Today, dear reader, let us celebrate the anniversary of the publication of Kafka’s The Trial.  Let’s set the stage: it’s 1924, Berlin’s a cauldron of post-war malaise, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial hits the world, published posthumously thanks to his friend Max Brod, who – bless his defiant heart – ignored Kafka’s dying wish to torch his manuscripts.  If my best friend did that, I might be inclined to haunt his ass ruthlessly for the rest of miserable life.  Be that as it may, I’m quite glad old Max did what he did…this book is amazing.  Josef K., a regular bank clerk, wakes up one morning to find himself arrested for a crime he doesn’t know, by authorities he can’t comprehend, in a world that refuses to explain itself.  Kafka constructs a suffocating machine of bureaucratic dread and existential terror, slicing through the veneer of order with surgical precision.  This sort of raw, unfiltered work became a cornerstone of modernist literature, its influence being seen over everyone from Orwell’s 1984 to Camus’ The Stranger.

Kafka is able to turn the mundane into the macabre, to take the everyday – courtrooms, paperwork, faceless officials – and render it as a Kafkaesque (yes, he birthed the term) descent into absurdity.  Josef K. isn’t battling dragons or gods; he’s battling a system so opaque, so indifferent, that it might as well be a deity of apathy.  Kafka strips away any comforting illusions of justice or reason.  K.’s arrest isn’t dramatic – it’s banal, a couple of low-level bureaucrats eating his breakfast while they detain him.  From there, the story spirals into a fever dream of endless corridors, stifling attics, and cryptic conversations with characters who seem to know more than they’ll ever say.  Kafka’s prose forces you to feel K.’s mounting paranoia as he’s ground down by a machine he can’t fight because he can’t even see it.  It’s the psychological vivisection of the terror of being alive in a world that doesn’t care if you understand it.

That’s all I have time for today, dear reader…the book is calling, and so, regrettably, is Mgmt wanting a progress report and to see today’s work.

N.P.: “X the Eyes” – Mr. Strange