Fiction Fun! Friday, October 20, 2023 The Trial, Frank Kafka (1925)
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925). Kafka lived from 1883 to 1924, almost entirely in Prague, where there’s now a Kafka Museum. He died of tuberculosis; his three younger sisters died in Nazi death camps. There’s a word “Kafkaesque” in English; the online unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary links this to “a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality,” and the American Heritage dictionary links it to “a sense of impending danger.” The Trial tells the story of Joseph K., who is arrested and prosecuted for something unspecified. A German list made in 1999 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century put The Trial second. There are several translations, all acceptable; we’ve ordered the one by Breon Mitchell, from Schocken Books, also on Audible audio