The Castle

By Franz Kafka

Kafka's final novel was written during 1922, when the tuberculosis that was to kill him was already at an advanced stage. Fragmentary and unfinished, it perhaps never could have been finished; perhaps the tensions between K., the Castle and the village, K.'s struggle for acceptance or recognition by the mysterious Castle authorities or by the people of the village, never will and never can be resolved.

Like much of Kafka's work, The Castle is enigmatic and polyvalent. Is it an allegory of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire as it disintegrates into modern nation states, or a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? Is it the search by a central European Jew for acceptance and integration into a dominant culture? Is it a spiritual quest for grace or salvation, or an individual's struggle between his sense of independence and his need for approval? Is K. is an opportunist, a victim, or an outsider battling against an elusive authority? Is the Castle a benign source of authority or a whimsical system of control?

Like K., the reader is presented with conflicting perspectives that rehearse the existential dilemmas and uncertainties of literary modernity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: May 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781848704855

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a primarily German-speaking Bohemian author, known for his impressive fusion of realism and fantasy in his work. Despite his commendable writing abilities, Kafka worked as a lawyer for most of his life and wrote in his free time. Though most of Kafka’s literary acclaim was gained postmortem, he earned a respected legacy and now is regarded as a major literary figure of the 20th century.

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Introduction

Rather like ‘Orwellian’, the term ‘Kafkaesque’ has come to be used, often enough by those who have not read a word of Kafka, to describe what are perceived as typically or even uniquely modern traumas: existential alienation, isolation and insecurity, the labyrinth of state bureaucracy, the corrupt or whimsical abuse of totalitarian power, the impenetrable tangle of legal systems, the knock on the door in the middle of the night (or, in the case of Josef K. in The Trial, just before breakfast). Kafka appears to have articulated, and indeed to have prefigured, many of the horrors and terrors of twentieth-century existence, the Angst of a post-Nietzschean world in which God is dead, in which there is therefore no ultimate authority, no final arbiter of truth, justice or morality. Ironically, for all his own debilitating diffidence and his reported instructions to have all his unpublished works destroyed after his death, Kafka has become established as a towering, ‘iconic’ figure of twentieth-century literature.

There have, of course, been dissenting voices. For much Marx-ist orthodoxy, Kafka was a negative exemplar of self-absorbed bourgeois defeatism, burdening posterity with his own neuroses, unproductive and enfeebling. His works were banned in Nazi Germany (he was both Jewish and a ‘degenerate’ modernist), and met with official disapproval in post-war Eastern bloc countries, including his own country Czechoslovakia. Only occasionally were there defiant attempts to revive official interest, notably in the Prague Spring of 1968; but it was not until after 1989 that his works were freely available in most of Eastern Europe. From a quite different direction, the American critic Edmund Wilson characterised Kafka memorably and provocatively as a ‘Brocken Spectre’. This is a phenomenon occasionally glimpsed by mountaineers when a low sun throws the climber’s shadow across mist or cloud in a valley or corrie below; the shadow appears impressively huge, with an iridescent halo around its head. The point of Wilson’s analogy is that the size of the shadow is an illusion; in physical reality it is far smaller than it appears – as is the shadow cast by Kafka over modern literary consciousness.

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, the son of Hermann Kafka, an itinerant Jewish trader from provincial Bohemia who established a successful haberdashery business in the capital shortly before Franz’s birth, and of Julie Löwy, who came from a prosperous family of more orthodox, but culturally and professionally assimilated German-Jewish origins. Under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, German was the official language of the future Czechoslovakia; the language of the Kafka household was German, and Franz was given a German education. For all his strange uniqueness, he belongs firmly and consciously within a German literary and cultural tradition – though the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard was also a profound influence; he also learned to write in Czech, knew Yiddish and taught himself some Hebrew. A lonely childhood, a delicate constitution and progressive ill-health (which Kafka attributed to, or at least regarded as a manifestation of, a psychic or spiritual sickness), the consciousness of belonging to a minority in two senses (a Jew in Austro-Hungary, a German in Czech Bohemia), and above all an extremely fraught and problematic relationship with his overbearing, philistine, and opinionated father – all these factors must have conspired to mark Kafka as a writer who articulated the vision of a fragile, insecure and vertiginous existence.

Kafka’s relationship with his father haunts much of his writing; but it is expressed most vividly and devastatingly in two accounts, one presented as autobiography and one as fiction. Though neither can be read as straightforward biography, there can be little doubt that they reflect, at least obliquely, his own anguished filial feelings of pietas and fear, respect and resentment, obedience and rebellion. The relation between biography and imagination in Kafka’s work is too wide a subject to go into here; but the many parallels are striking and tantalizing – Kafka seems to invite identification in many details of his work, even naming the figures of his principal novels Josef K. in The Trial, and in The Castle simply K.

In the Letter to my Father, written when he was thirty-six (this is no adolescent outburst), he even states: ‘All my writing was about you.’ The Letter appears to be an attempt at cathartic self-analysis, an ambivalent acknowledgement that his father has driven him into a situation where he can only retreat into the isolation of the imaginative artist. Instead of stability, encouragement and guidance, his father, who ‘ruled the world from his armchair’, has used abuse, threat, sarcasm and mockery to rob his son of all security and self-confidence. In the even more disturbing short story The Judgement, a physically feeble, toothless and ailing father, who nevertheless dominates his son as a ‘giant’ figure of paternal authority, sentences the son to death by drowning. The son throws himself from a bridge with the words: ‘Dear parents, I really have always loved you.’

For all the nightmarish insecurities of his imaginative work and his own inner life, Kafka’s professional career was, by contrast, remarkably ordered (though increasingly disrupted by sickness). In 1903 he took a law degree at the German University of Prague and in 1908 joined the clerical staff of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, working diligently and conscientiously until 2.00 p.m., when he would devote himself to writing, frequently into the night. He occupied a responsible post before taking retirement on grounds of ill-health in 1922. A move to Berlin in 1923 to live with Dora Dymant – the last in a series of emotionally fraught and ill-fated sexual relationships – ended when he was admitted to a sanatorium near Vienna, where he died of laryngeal tuberculosis in 1924.

Kafka instructed his friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work – only some short stories, among them The Judgement, Metamorphosis, and In the Penal Colony, had been published in his lifetime. Instead, Brod preserved the manuscripts, many of them unfinished; he collated and edited them himself, which has led to some uncertainty about the authentic versions – both The Trial and The Castle are incomplete, and the intended order of chapters in The Trial is uncertain. Kafka may well have planned to add more material to The Trial (Chapter 8, for example, is unfinished), and the wandering, inconclusive interviews between Josef K. and his mentors could have been extended and elaborated almost indefinitely. In The Castle, K. fails to gain the access or acceptance he craves, and perhaps was never meant to. Much additional material has been discovered and added since the first published editions of The Castle – the conversation with Bürgel, the distribution of the files, Pepi’s long monologue; and the novel breaks off in mid-sentence.

Kafka frequently expressed himself through aphorism and parable, and some of these brief narratives distil the main themes of his work with chilling brevity – though not necessarily with clarity, since they are as oblique and enigmatic as any of the longer works. Many express remoteness, hopelessness, the impossibility of access to sources of authority or certainty, or what in German is termed Ausweglosigkeit – the impossibility of escape or release from a labyrinth of false trails and frustrated hopes. The Cat and the Mouse, a ‘little fable’, tells of a mouse who complains to a cat that the world is getting smaller every day. Wherever it runs, walls are closing in on it; it has already reached the last room, and in the corner stands the trap it is heading for. ‘You only have to change direction,’ replies the cat before it eats up the mouse. In Give it up, a stranger hurrying to the station notices that it is much later than he thought. Unsure of the way, he asks a policeman who says: ‘Do you expect me to tell you the way?’ ‘Of course,’ replies the stranger, ‘since I cannot find it myself.’ ‘Give it up, give it up,’ says the policeman, laughing and turning away ‘like someone who wishes to be alone with his laughter’.

An Imperial Messenger is a more elaborate parable on the impossibility of access to ultimate authority, on the infinity of obstacles that hinder the transmission of any message of comfort or reassurance; it could almost be entitled ‘God is dead’. As the Emperor of China was dying, a humble subject is told, he summoned a messenger to his deathbed and whispered to him a message meant only for you, an insignificant subject at the furthest remove from the imperial sun. The Emperor makes the messenger repeat the message to him to ensure its accuracy, and the messenger sets out. A vigorous, tireless man, he fights his way through the crowds gathered around the dying Emperor; the imperial emblem of the sun on his breast gives him passage, he makes progress as no one else could. But there are so many people in his way; he gets no further than the inner halls of the palace. And even if he did, how many halls, staircases, courtyards and palaces would there be to struggle through – and so on, ‘through millennia’. No one could get through, even with a dead man’s message; but you sit at your window in the evening and dream the message to yourself.

A similar infinity of obstacles, a vanishing perspective of impossibilities, informs the parable of the doorkeeper at the gates of the law in The Trial. Access to the law, the source of supreme authority or truth, is through a series of doors guarded by ever more fearsome doorkeepers. The man from the country who seeks admittance to the law spends his whole life waiting to be let in; only in his dying moment is he told by the doorkeeper that this door was provided uniquely for him – and it is now going to be closed. At the end the dying man glimpses an ‘inextinguishable radiance’ that streams from within; but that light of possible assurance or redemption is itself inaccessible.

Kafka began writing The Castle in January 1922; but already in September of that year he announced to Max Brod that he had suspended work on it ‘obviously for ever’. It seems that it was not his early death that abruptly interrupted the novel, but rather that, for reasons that must remain speculative, he voluntarily, if despairingly, abandoned work on it almost two years before his death in June 1924; rather than returning to The Castle during the time left to him, he devoted himself to writing or editing less major projects.

Like The Trial, The Castle has the structure of a quest by the protagonist K. – evidently a quest for acceptance into the community of the unnamed and remote village, and for access to the enigmatic authorities of the Castle who control the village through a bizarre but powerful quasi-feudal administration. On the simplest biographical and cultural level, it can be and has been read as the quest of a Jewish subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or possibly of a citizen of early Czech democracy, for assimilation and acceptance into a prevailing culture. The outcast Barnabas family, ostracized and detested, has also been seen as representing the fate of Jewry in a pre-Holocaust Europe.

However, any attempts at straightforward or systematic explanations à clef are scarcely adequate to deal with the complex ambiguities of the novel, which presents the reader with a baffling range of competing and often contradictory options. This is no doubt because so much of the novel is conveyed through extensive dia-logues, all of which are conducted with K. and are reflected both via the consciousness of the speakers and via that of K. himself. The narrator is anything but objective or omniscient; everything is seen or heard by K., or told to him, and the reader’s perspective is necessarily identical with, and limited to, that of K. Indeed, Kafka began writing The Castle as a first-person narrative, and this solipsistic perspective was maintained after he recast it in the third person: it might just as well still be a first-person narrative. The dialogues themselves not only contradict other dialogues (or at the very least present very different viewpoints), but contain contradictions, alternatives and shifting perspectives within themselves, so that the speakers – for example Bürgel – constantly change tack, qualifying and adjusting their arguments. These shifts of perspective are frequently underscored by grammatical and stylistic devices; Pepi’s story, for example, is a form of stream-of-consciousness that is conveyed in a jumble of conventional past tense, historic present, indirect speech and style indirect libre (free indirect speech).

K.’s quest has also been seen as a search for religious or metaphysical certainty or at least assurance, or again as his struggle against an archaic socio-political system, as the challenge to a corrupt and moribund order. But K. cannot plausibly or consistently be understood as a heroic individual battling (almost) single-handedly against perceived injustice or authority. We might be tempted to see him as a holy fool whose honest naivety challenges the established order – the landlady of the Herrenhof inn tells him he is ‘either a fool or a child or a very wicked, dangerous person’ – yet he is also unscrupulous, opportunistic, exploitative and manipulative (especially of the women in his life, though he is at times also manipulated in turn). His attempts to infiltrate the Castle, or to gain acceptance by it, are qualified by his hubristic and aggressive approach – from the beginning he sees his struggle with the Castle authorities in terms of war, combat and attack. Even at the most elementary level, the reader is given apparently unreliable information about K.; for example, it appears at one point that he has left a wife and family behind to come to the village, but they are never mentioned again, and he coolly contemplates marriage to Frieda. Does this suggest structural carelessness on Kafka’s part, recklessness on K.’s part, or the almost fairy-tale unreality of the world of Castle and village – as if an amnesiac K. has entered a new existence that bears no relation to his previous one?

We might also be invited to see the Castle and its authorities as menacing, brooding over a subjugated village, its officials as venal and lecherous, at least as perceived by K., whose paranoia must qualify his reliability as a source. Yet the Castle can be perceived as benign, or at least as not malevolent. Is it a source of stable paternalistic, patriarchal authority? Is it the Castle that is corrupt and decadent, or only some of its officials? The fact that there are bad priests, bad lawyers, does not therefore mean the Church or the Law, religion or justice, are also corrupt or inaccessible. The Castle and its officials are no more benign than the Old Testament Jehovah; but its authority is unquestioned, indeed willingly accepted, by most of those it governs.

K’s attempts to gain a foothold on the (literally and figuratively) slippery approach the Castle (the almost permanent deep blanket of snow covering the village and barring any easy access to the Castle is a pervasive symbol) centre on the utterly enigmatic figure of Klamm, who is notably physically absent from the narrative, though his authority dominates the novel. Is it indeed Klamm that K. glimpses through the peep-hole? He might as well be a wax dummy. Is or was Frieda his mistress? Pepi’s biased account suggests this was a fiction cultivated by Frieda. Is it Klamm that Barnabas sees in the Castle offices, or only someone who looks like him? Does anyone know what Klamm looks like? He is ubiquitous, but utterly elusive. Is he like Godot, sought but never found? Is he a Messiah figure, a deus absconditus, or a Wizard of Oz?

The Castle officials are almost uniformly obstructive or unhelpful – with the possible exception of Bürgel, who might seem to be giving K. sound advice for his quest, but this advice is given among a great deal of manifest absurdity; the whole scene is hilarious and ludicrous, with K. and Bürgel fighting for space on Bürgel’s bed; Bürgel is cast in K.’s dreams as a ‘Greek god’ – which is quite at odds with his actual persona; and K. is in any case too exhausted to profit from Bürgel’s advice, let alone act on it, whether it is sound or not.

The multiple ambiguities of the novel allow no certainty; as soon as one explanation suggests itself, it is subverted or contradicted. Amalia, like K., might be seen as a heroic figure who defies the abuse of authority by Sortini and refuses to submit to his casual lechery; but even K. points out to her sister Olga that Amalia’s stubborn pride has plunged her family into penury and isolation. The ostensibly heroic behaviour of Amalia only underlines, in parallel to K.’s efforts, the futility, perhaps even the unwisdom, of individual or isolated acts of rebellion or protest.

The novel remained unfinished, indeed, it breaks off in mid-sentence. We have no indication whatever whether K. will ever gain acceptance or be granted access to Klamm. Max Brod claimed that Kafka told him K. was to be informed on his deathbed that the Castle authorities had, exceptionally, given him permission to stay in the village – a typical Kafka conclusion, one might think, and one that has something in common with the parable of the doorkeeper at the gates of the law in The Trial. But this is hearsay evidence; any speculation about the conclusion of the narrative remains, well, inconclusive – and not simply because Kafka did not live to complete the novel.

John R. Williams

St Andrews, 2009

Translator’s Note

The translation is based on Franz Kafka, Das Schloß, ed. Malcolm Pasley, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2008. I have retained the original forms of German proper names (Artur, Jeremias, Henriette, etc.). Formal or professional terms of address (‘Herr Landvermesser’, ‘Frau Wirtin’) go uneasily into English, and have been rendered, for example, as ‘Herr K.’, ‘sir’, or ‘madam’. The term ‘mayor’ for Gemeindevorsteher is not an exact equivalent, given the differences between continental and British local government systems, and is a pis-aller. Schloß in German means not only a castle, but a lock; this can hardly be conveyed in translation, should the pun be considered deliberate, unless something like ‘fortress’ is used. Pepi’s story in Chapter 25 changes tenses and grammatical idioms bewilderingly; I have endeavoured to reproduce the tenses as closely as possible to the original, except of course where the past and pluperfect of indirect speech is signalled in German respectively by the present and the perfect of the subjunctive. As in my translation of The Trial, I have modified Kafka’s punctuation and split the text into more frequent paragraphs than the original in order to make it more reader-friendly (pace Sir Malcolm Pasley).

Suggestions for Further Reading

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Albert Camus, The Outsider

Elias Canetti, Kafka’s Other Trial

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka, The Trial

Gustav Meyrink, The Golem

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

The Castle

1. Arrival

It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay deep in snow. Nothing could be seen of the Castle Hill, it was hidden in mist and darkness, and not even the faintest gleam of light indicated the great castle there. For a long time K. stood on the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, looking up into the apparent emptiness.

Then he set out to find lodgings for the night. At the inn they were still up; the landlord was taken aback and disturbed by the late arrival of a guest, but although he had no rooms free he was willing to let K. sleep on a straw mattress in the parlour, which K. found acceptable. Some peasants were still sitting over their beer, but he did not want to speak to anyone, so he fetched the mattress from the attic himself and lay down by the stove. It was warm, the peasants sat quietly, he studied them for a while through tired eyes and then fell asleep.

But shortly afterwards he was woken. A young man dressed in town clothes with an actor’s face, narrow eyes and dark eyebrows, was standing beside him with the landlord. The peasants were still there too; some had turned their chairs round in order to see and hear better. The young man apologised very politely for having woken K., introduced himself as the son of the Castle Warden, then said: ‘This village belongs to the Castle. Anyone who lives here or spends the night here is, as it were, staying at the Castle. No one may do this without the permission of the Count. You have no such permission, at least you have not presented it.’

K. sat up and smoothed his hair. He looked up at them and said: ‘Which village have I strayed into? Is there a castle here, then?’

‘Indeed there is,’ said the young man slowly, while one or two of those present shook their heads at K.’s question, ‘it is the castle of Count Westwest.’

‘And I must have permission to stay the night?’ asked K., as if trying to convince himself he had not dreamed what he had just heard.

‘You must have permission,’ came the reply, and with what seemed to K. a gesture of crude mockery the young man held out his arm to the landlord and his guests and asked: ‘Or perhaps he doesn’t need it?’

‘Then I shall have to go and get permission,’ said K., yawning. He threw off the blanket and made to get up.

‘From whom, then?’ asked the young man.

‘From the Count,’ said K.. ‘That is all I can do.’

‘You want to obtain permission from the Count now, at midnight?’ cried the young man, taking a step backwards.

‘Is that not possible?’ asked K. calmly. ‘Then why did you wake me up?’

At this the young man flew into a rage. ‘You are behaving like a tramp!’ he shouted. ‘Show some respect for the Count’s representative! I woke you in order to inform you that you must leave the Count’s territory at once.’

‘That’s enough play-acting,’ said K. quietly. He lay back and pulled the blanket over him. ‘You are going a little too far, young man, and I shall come back to your behaviour tomorrow. Should I require witnesses, the landlord and these gentlemen will bear me out. Apart from that, let me inform you that I am the surveyor the Count has sent for. My assistants are arriving tomorrow in a carriage with my instruments. I took the opportunity to take a walk through the snow, but unfortunately I lost my way several times, which is why I arrived so late. I realised for myself that it was too late to report to the Castle before you chose to tell me. That is why I made do with this place for the night, where you – to put it mildly – were rude enough to disturb me. That is all I have to say by way of explanation. Good night, gentlemen.’ With this, K. turned towards the stove.

‘Surveyor?’ he heard someone ask uncertainly behind him, then there was silence. But the young man soon recovered himself and said to the landlord, quietly enough to suggest he did not wish to disturb K.’s sleep, but loudly enough for him to hear: ‘I’ll phone and ask.’ So there was even a telephone in this village inn? They were very well provided for. This detail took K. by surprise, though in general terms he had in fact expected that to be the case. The telephone turned out to be situated just above his head; he had been so sleepy he had not noticed it. If the young man had to use it, with the best will in the world he would have to disturb K.; it was just a matter of whether K. was going to allow him to. He decided not to object; but in that case there was no point in pretending he was asleep, so he turned over on his back again. He saw the peasants talking together in a huddle; the arrival of a surveyor was quite an event. The door to the kitchen had opened, and the bulky figure of the landlady filled the doorway; the landlord went over on tiptoe to tell her what was going on. Then the phone conversation began. The Warden of the Castle was asleep, but a deputy warden, one of the deputy wardens, Herr Fritz, was there. The young man, who gave his name as Schwarzer, explained that he had found K., a very shabby-looking man in his thirties, sleeping calmly on a straw mattress using a tiny rucksack as a pillow, with a stout stick within his reach. Naturally, he said, he had found the man suspicious, and since the landlord had obviously neglected his duty, it had been up to him, Schwarzer, to look into the matter. On being woken up and questioned, then officially threatened with expulsion from the Count’s territory, he went on, K. had reacted discourteously – perhaps with some justification as it turned out, for he claimed to be a surveyor engaged by the Count. Clearly it was at the very least his official duty to verify this claim, so Schwarzer was asking Herr Fritz to enquire at central office whether a surveyor was actually expected, and to ring him back with the answer at once.

Then there was silence; Fritz made his enquiries up there, while here they waited for a reply. K. remained lying on his back, he did not even turn over, and appearing to show no curiosity stared in front of him. The combination of malice and caution in Schwarzer’s account gave him an idea of the quasi-diplomatic conventions so effortlessly assumed by those in the Castle, even by minor officials like Schwarzer. They were not idle there, either; the central office worked though the night. They obviously replied very promptly, too, for Fritz soon rang back. The answer was evidently very brief, for Schwarzer immediately slammed down the receiver in a rage. ‘I knew it!’ he cried. ‘No trace of a surveyor. He’s lying, he’s a common tramp, probably worse.’ For a moment K. thought they were all going to assault him, Schwarzer, the peasants, the landlord and his wife; in order to protect himself from the initial onslaught, at least, he crawled under his blanket. Then the telephone rang again – particularly loudly, it seemed to K. – and slowly he put his head out again. Although it seemed improbable that it was again about K., they all hesitated and Schwarzer returned to the phone. He listened to a lengthy explanation and then said quietly: ‘So it was a mistake? That makes it very awkward for me. The Head of Department himself rang? That’s very strange. But how am I going to explain that to the surveyor?’

K. listened closely. So the Castle had appointed him as surveyor. On the one hand this was unwelcome news, for it showed that they knew all about him at the Castle, that they had weighed up the strengths and weaknesses and were ready to do battle with a smile. On the other hand, however, it was also fortunate, for it showed that they underrated him and that he would enjoy more freedom than he could previously have hoped. And if they thought they could keep him in a constant state of terror with this lofty acknowledgement of his status as a surveyor, they were mistaken; he felt mildly uneasy, that was all.

K. dismissed Schwarzer, who was approaching timidly, with a wave of his hand. He declined the landlord’s urgent invitation to move into his own room, accepting only a drink to help him sleep and the landlady’s offer of a wash basin with soap and towels; he did not even have to ask them to leave the room, for they all hurried out, turning their faces away so that he would not recognise them the next day. The lamp was extinguished, and he was left in peace at last. He slept deeply until morning, scarcely disturbed by one or two rats that scuttled past him.

At breakfast, which the landlord assured him would be paid for by the Castle together with all his board and lodging, he intended to go out into the village at once. Remembering the landlord’s behaviour the previous evening, K. had exchanged no more words with him than strictly necessary; but since the man constantly hovered around his chair with mute pleas, he invited him to sit down with him for a while.

‘I don’t know the Count yet,’ said K. ‘They say he pays well for good work, is that so? If you travel so far from your wife and children as I have, you want to take something home with you.’

‘No need to worry about that, sir; no one complains about bad pay.’

‘Well,’ said K., ‘I’m not shy, and I can speak my mind to the Count; but of course it’s better to be on good terms with these people.’

The landlord sat opposite K. on the edge of the window sill – he did not venture to sit more comfortably – and all the while gazed at K. anxiously with his large brown eyes. At first he had pressed himself on K.; now, it seemed, he would rather run away. Was he afraid to be quizzed about the Count? Did he not fully trust the ‘gentleman’ he took K. for? K. had to divert his attention. He looked at the clock and said: ‘My two assistants will be here soon; can you give them accommodation here?’

‘Of course, sir,’ he replied, ‘but won’t they be staying at the Castle with you?’

Was he so keen to lose customers, then, and K. in particular, that he insisted on assigning them to the Castle?

‘That is not yet clear,’ said K. ‘First I must find out what sort of work they have for me. If I have to work down here, for instance, it would be more sensible to live down here. I fear life at the Castle may not suit me. I always like to be free.’

‘You don’t know the Castle,’ said the landlord quietly.

‘Of course,’ said K., ‘one should not jump to conclusions. For the moment, all I know about the Castle is that they know how to choose a proper surveyor. Perhaps they have other qualities up there.’ And he stood up to escape from the landlord, who was biting his lip nervously. It was not easy to gain the man’s confidence.

As he was about to go, K. caught sight of a sombre portrait hanging in a dark frame on the wall. He had already noticed it from where he slept, but at that distance he had not made out any details; he had thought the picture itself had been removed from the frame, leaving only the dark backing. But now he saw that it was in fact a portrait, the head and shoulders of a man of about fifty. His head was sunk so low on his chest that scarcely anything could be seen of his eyes; his heavy domed forehead and strong hooked nose seemed to weigh his head down. His full beard, pressed in at the chin by the inclination of his head, spread down over his chest. His thick head of hair rested on the splayed fingers of his left hand, which supported the head but could not raise it. ‘Who is that?’ asked K., ‘the Count?’ He was standing in front of the picture and did not turn to look at the landlord. ‘No,’ said the landlord, ‘it’s the Warden of the Castle.’ ‘Indeed, they have a handsome warden,’ said K., ‘a pity that he has such an ill-mannered son.’ ‘No,’ said the landlord, pulling K. closer to him and whispering in his ear, ‘Schwarzer was exaggerating yesterday. His father is only a deputy warden, and one of the lowest ones, too.’ At this moment the landlord seemed to K. like a child. ‘The scoundrel!’ said K., and laughed; but the landlord did not join in his laughter, saying: ‘Even his father is powerful.’ ‘Get away!’ said K., ‘you think everyone is powerful. Me too, I dare say?’ ‘You?’ replied the landlord, timidly but seriously. ‘I don’t believe you are powerful.’ ‘You’re very observant, I see,’ said K. ‘In fact, between you and me, I’m not powerful, and so I probably have no less respect than you do for those who are powerful, only I’m not as honest as you, so I won’t always admit it.’ And K. patted the landlord lightly on the cheek in a friendly gesture of reassurance. And indeed, this did make the landlord smile faintly. He really looked like a boy with his soft, almost beardless face; however did he come to marry his spreading wife, older than himself, who could be seen through a hatch to the kitchen next door, bustling about with her elbows held out wide? But K. did not wish to question him any further just then, in case the smile he had finally coaxed from him should fade, so he gestured towards the door; it was opened for him and he stepped out into the fine winter morning.

Now he saw above him the distinct outlines of the Castle in the clear air, even more sharply defined by the thin layer of snow that lay everywhere and picked out all its shapes. However, there seemed to be much less snow up on the hill than here in the village, where K.’s progress was no less laborious than on the road he had travelled the previous day. Here the snow piled up to the windows of the cottages and weighed down on the low roofs, but up on the hill everything towered upwards lightly and freely, or so it seemed, at least from down here.

As it appeared from this distance, the Castle was much as K. had expected. It was neither an ancient fortress nor a more recent palace, but an extensive site consisting of a few two-storey structures and a number of lower buildings packed close together; if one had not known that it was a castle, it could have been taken for a small township. K. could only see one tower, and he could not make out whether it belonged to a domestic building or a church. Swarms of crows wheeled round it.

His eyes fixed on the Castle, K. went on with nothing else in mind. But as he approached it, the Castle disappointed him. It really was just a wretched little village, a collection of mean houses, whose only distinction was that they were stone-built; but the paint had long since peeled and the stone seemed to have crumbled. K. was briefly reminded of his native town, which was scarcely inferior to this supposed castle. If he had simply come to see it, it would not have been worth the long journey; he would have done better to revisit his own home town that he had not seen for so long. In his mind he compared the church tower there with the tower that rose above him here. The former thrust boldly and vigorously upwards, tapering towards its summit, its broad roof covered with red tiles; a secular structure – what else can we build? – but with a higher aspiration than this mean huddle of houses and making a clearer statement than just dreary everyday existence. The tower up here – it was the only one visible, and as now became clear, it was the tower of a residence, perhaps of the main castle building – was a uniform round structure, mercifully part-covered in ivy, with small windows now glinting in the sun and creating a somewhat bizarre effect, and ending in a parapet topped with battlements that jutted into the blue sky, precarious, irregular, and fragile, as if drawn by the anxious or careless hand of a child. It was as if some mournful inhabitant, who should by rights have shut himself into the furthest room of the house, had burst through the roof and stood up in order to show himself to the world.

Once more K. stopped, as if by standing still he could judge the scene better. But he was interrupted. Behind the village church where he had stopped – it was actually only a chapel onto which a barn-like extension had been added to accommodate the congregation – was the school. It was a long, low building, its appearance suggesting a remarkable combination of a temporary structure and

Reviews for The Castle

[.monkey.-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Kafka is interesting, that's for sure. But his style does not work well for me, I find it a chore to read even though I'm intrigued by it.

[jakebornheimer · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A frustrating reading experience. Finished 3 chapters and thought i'd better leave it alone for now. Will eventually revisit, but for now it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

[jonfaith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. Of course they aren’t meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error.

We were all once younger. I don't know if we have all been haunted.

[nog_5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I would like to see where Kafka would have taken this unfinished novel which stops in mid-sentence. His protagonist K. seems so unreflective and tossed about by those around him. Chock full of that patented dark Kafka humor, it lurches from one slightly nightmarish episode to another, and the translation seems to catch the dreamlike prose that this novel is known for. A bit frustrating to read, for Kafka seems to dispense with paragraphs for many pages at a time. It really slowed me down.

[cla83 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely incomprehensible!

[bookomaniac-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nog bevreemdender dan Het Proces, maar prachtige scènes. Andermaal het individu tegenover de onzichtbare almacht, maar minstens evenzeer over hoe de perceptie van mensen doorslaggevend is. Tegelijk een soort Bildungsroman : als K. aankomt is hij een onbeschreven blad, maar hij probeert hardnekkig dat blad ingevuld te krijgen.Eerste keer gelezen toen ik 17 was.

[ashryan_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Castle tells the story of a man known simply as K. who arrives in a village to work as a surveyor at the invitation of the authorities in the town's castle, only to discover that there has been some kind of mix up and no surveyor is needed. It follows his attempts to deal with the castle's bureaucracy to receive justice or at least some kind of work (though he never manages to actually meet any of the major officials, but only communicates with them through a couple of apparently useless messages) and the village's residents, who are used to life under the castle's arbitrary rule and have little sympathy for K.'s troubles.The Castle is probably my least favorite of Kafka's major unfinished works, perhaps in part because it seems to be the most unfinished of them. It is similar to The Trial in some ways, but also different in some interesting respects. While the story in The Trial involved endless, mind-numbing bureaucracy with regard to one particular aspect of life, namely the legal system, in the world of The Castle that bureaucracy is expanded to encompass ALL aspects of life, such that life itself becomes unlivable even if one is not accused of any wrongdoing. So The Castle is rather broader, but thus loses the focus of a work like The Trial (on the issue of guilt, in that case)...and that broadness seems to have fomented Kafka's tendency toward vagueness.The Castle also feels somewhat rambling---there are some amusing or thought-provoking parts, but in general it just doesn't seem to be going anywhere. That's kind of the point, of course, but after a while it just starts to drag. It didn't seem that well-written for Kafka either, but I don't know how much of that is due to Mark Harman's translation of this edition and how much to the rough state of Kafka's original drafts.On the whole, worth reading perhaps once, but some of Kafka's other work is better.

[cathyvil · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is like reading a dream. I'm not sure whose dream it is though. The Castle is the story of K who was summoned to a village as Land-Surveyor and his trials and tribulations trying to work through the bureaucracy of the castle's politics. Void of any consistent punctuation (paragraphs go on for pages) I found both K and the villagers to be nonsensical and irrational. This must be the most contrary town ever written about. The situations are inane, but Kafka's style is still engaging where I wanted to find out what crazy direction the story would take next. Had Kafka ever finished this work so it wasn't such a burden to read, it definitely would have earned itself more stars.

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

 There was a news article today suggesting that two thirds of people questioned lie about the books they have read to appear more sophisticated, so how do you know I'm telling the truth...



This was somewhat strange. It's never quite clear what is true and what isn't. Everything is open to interpretation. The main character is an incommer, who views the situation in the village very differently from the locals. There are many rules and customs that make the villagers seem brainwashed in comparison to the incommer. The presence of the castle - the seat of power - is always mysterious and threatening, even sinister.

[sweetiegherkin · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A land-surveyor simply named K travels to a distant village after being summoned to work there by officials at the mysterious Castle. Upon arrival, he is treated poorly by the majority of the local villagers and is told that a mistake was made when he was offered a job as there is no work for him. However, K does manage to almost immediately become engaged to the barmaid Frieda and make friends with the messenger Barnabas and his family, who are considered outcasts of society because of his sister Amalia's refusal to offer sexual favors to a Castle official. Meanwhile, K fruitlessly pursues Klamm, the Castle official assigned to him, in hopes of finding out more about his situation. Additionally, K tries to manage the annoying antics of the two assistants he meets upon arrival at the village and is given a deal to work as the school's janitor in lieu of the land-surveying he expected. I am going to start this review by openly and only somewhat abashedly noting that the reason I gave this book such a low rating is because I flat out did not understand what was going on the majority of the time. Kafka is known for being surreal and writing in a dream-like logic, but this book crossed a line for me. While I enjoyed both The Metamorphosis and The Trial, The Castle dragged on far too long for me without ever seeming to make a point. My research on the book points to various themes of the book: religion/salvation (which I did not see at all); isolation/alienation (yes, it's there but c'mon already, how many long dialogues do we need to get that K and the Barnabas family don't fit in?); and bureaucratic red tape (which The Trial already covered perfectly). But, as I hinted out above, the book just went on for too long to make me care any longer about trying to suss out what on earth Kafka was talking about anymore. There is no real action in the book and little by the way of "showing" in the narration. Rather, the book is just one long series of monologues with characters going on and on about the Castle and its inhabitants, often contradicting themselves as their speeches droned on interminably. There's only so much a reader can take of yet another character saying something about how K doesn't know how things work in the village and how wonderful the Castle officials are, no matter how unattainable they may be. Some readers have noted that this book is "funny," presumably in a dark humor/satirical way, but sadly I did not find that to be true for the vast majority of the text. Again, the narrative really seemed to drag at times, and I lost a lot of interest by the half-way point, after which I was just ready for it to end. When the book did finally conclude - if you can call a unfinished sentence a conclusion - I was just happy it was over (although that was mixed with annoyance that the end was uncompleted!). I recognize that Kafka was ill and dying when he wrote this book and that he asked that his unfinished manuscripts be destroyed upon his death; therefore this criticism of the novel is somewhat unfair as the author was unable to revise, edit down the superfluous dialogue, fix the strange POV/tense change near the end, etc. Nevertheless, as this book is highly praised as a "must-read" classic, I looked at it through that critical lens and was deeply disappointed. The audio version with the equally praised narrator George Guidall did little to remedy the situation. I found Guidall a dull reader who only added to my attitude of "hurry-up-and-be-done" regarding this book. I'd very much recommend The Metamorphosis, The Trial, or even the short stories to anyone interested in reading Kafka for the first time, but I'd steer people away from this book personally. Just my two cents.

[rhysickle · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I love the trial, and many of Kafka's short stories but the castle lacks something somehow. Maybe it's the way the oppressive, intense rush of a confusing modern world that Kafka captures so well elsewhere can hardly hope to be translated into the medievalesque setting of this novel. It comes across as rather twee and annoying.

[ireed110 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

"I want to go to the castle!" "You can't get there from here.""But I need to go the castle!""You can't get there from here."I hated this book.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'd never read anything like Kafka when I found "The Castle" down at my local library. I was still quite young then, and perhaps wasn't prepared for what lay in store for me; it took me a while to make my way through the book, and when I had finished I wasn't sure how to make sense of it all. I'm still not sure, but I do know that, as a piece of fiction, "The Castle" is very impressive.As a side-note, it's with some sadness that I saw my library redeveloped a few years back. It wasn't a real redevelopment - now they have computers and such - but what changed about five years was the removal of one little carousel, stuck at the end of an aisle where it didn't really belong, that was crowded with foreign books. I discovered Kafka there, and Lem too; how I wish I could make more discoveries like those so innocently, and without such precipitous expectations!

[kawgirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've read the chapters in different orders and the story had meaning every time. Fascinating and twisted, but that is Kafka for you.

[heidilove_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

a novel of the futility of trying. go ahead. read it. i dare you.

[robertmorrow_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A frustrating, irritating book that accurately describes the impersonality of the bureaucracy.

[haidji-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book can be read as an introduction to dystopian literature.Joseph K. (the protagonist) arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle. K. believes that he's been invited to a town to do some land surveying, and realises upon his arrival that his invitation was maybe the result of a bureaucratic mishap. K. wants answers from the officials at the castle that overlooks the town.This book is about bureaucracy, meaning, connection, relationships, and how hierarchy impacts the way we experience and live in this world.It may be an unfinished work, but it is an amazing book that can test your conception of the real purpose in your life.

[garrison0550 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I'm getting off the Kafka train at the next stop.

[eadieb-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I listened to the audio and I found it a lot easier to understand than trying to read it. I liked K's determination which teaches never to give up which is a good lesson. K's pain and agony were almost humorous at times as I would just say to myself, "Why don't you just move on?" As I listened I could feel the frustration of K trying to reach a goal that was so unattainable and it reminded me of some of the frustrations of everyday life. It is a difficult book to understand but I think it has a very profound message that life is an endless round of disappointments that seems to have no point but that is the point.

[pineapplejuggler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Being very dry and long-winded while being an unfinished book, The Castle was very hard to get through for me. Although it was only 280 pages, it would be much more if it had been edited using standard practices. As this is the first book by Kafka I have read, I am not sure if it his style, or because he didn't finish the book, but paragraph breaks were few and far between, even when there was a change in dialogue speaker.I did enjoy and find rather relatable Kafka's themes of the absurdity of a nontransparent, yet subtly out-of-control bureaucracy; the absurdity of the the status quo; and how people can have such different, yet thoroughly thought-out perspectives, possibly stemming from deeply ingrained biases.

[booklove2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This survived all three editions so far of '1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die'? I don't think it should have. 'The Trial' made my list of favorites the year I read that, so it can't be because I don't like Kafka. A lot of the same elements were in both books, but I guess The Trial was just more polished. The Castle is really an unfinished book, so you have to wonder how much Kafka may have changed it if he could have. And this is one of the books Kafka never wanted to publish. If The Castle was the first Kafka book I read, I don't think I would have tried any others. While reading this, I was jokingly thinking maybe "Kafkaesque" means a nightmarish book that never ends, takes way too long to read and seems pretty pointless, but then the book ends in the middle of a sentence, almost like waking up in the middle of a nightmare. I'd say try The Trial.

[ragwaine · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

No conclusion. Everyone was extremely analytical.

[rhinoa_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was sadly never finished by Kafka before he died in 1924. He began writing it in 1922 and it was first published after his death in 1926. It tells the story of K who is a surveyor. He is summoned to the castle, but when he arrives he is not granted admittance and it seems he was summoned by accident. He stays though and keeps trying to find ways around his exclusion and tries petitioning various people and officials.He meets Freida at one of the bars and after a tumble under one of the tables they end up engaged and living together. They are thrown out of the bar after the landlady falls out with K who generally seems to misunderstand and rub everyone up the wrong way. They end up living in a school room which is less than ideal with K's two unwanted assistants who keep getting him in more and more trouble!It's a strange novel and I never quite understood why K didn't just leave. There seemed no point in staying and I am sure he said he had a family (which I assumed meant wife) at the start. I liked the Barnabas character and his two sisters who unforatunely didn't get on with Freida at all. It's a shame it was never finished, it ends in the middle of a sentence in fact. I would love to have seen how it all played out and what became of K.

[atomheart_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Kafka's writing style is very challenging at points, droning on with long, highly punctuated sentences, and even longer paragraphs... sometimes spanning 10 pages. Somehow... its utterly annoying and totally engaging at the same time, very bizarre.Overall, it's a pity the book was unfinished, cause I was finally starting to get into it. For those who don't know, the book literally ends in mid-sentence.The main character K. speaks for Kafka's obvious hatred for bureaucracy and authority. Toward the end of the book, (who knows where that really is in relation to the story it intended to be) you start learning some interesting facts (purely opinions, because there are no facts in his world) that really shape the book and could change the way you look at the story, but unfortunately it was never expounded on... so one never knows where Kafka could had gone with this.

[davidcldriedger · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Castle always has the advantage . . .

[missizicks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was weird, but not as weird, or as difficult, as I was expecting. The narrative flows reasonably well. There are passages that go on interminably, but there's enough action to make them bearable. It felt like reading someone else's crazy dream, with the contradictions and strange passage of time. Poor K. Accepted into the village for all the wrong reasons. I see where The Prisoner TV show got its ideas from now!

[slmr4242 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is not your usual Kafka. Some parts were so wonderfully spare and seemed to hint at something fantastic underneath the surface--relationships with God, between society and hierarchy, and the way that people distance so-called others. The dialogue sections were sooo long, though. There were several chapters that I was nearly certain were completely written in dialogue.

I know that this was a work-in-progress, clearly evinced from the very last line, before a character is about to speak...and while Kafka was experimental, I don't think he was *that* experimental. That alone makes the whole thing quite interesting. The potential is definitely there, but it is something like sitting down to a dinner, smelling the wonderful dinner-smells to such an extent that you are almost actually able to taste it, and then, discovering that there is no meal, but instead, a lengthy description about what meal you might have had, over the growling of stomachs.

[indrit-76 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an important classic existentialist novel in the vein of other Kafka's works: absurd, heavy, gloomy, with no exit and at the same time not without a comedic sense to it. As with most of other Kafka's writings it's hard to pin them to one meaning, they are morally ambiguous and open to different interpretations. Who's to argue that Kafka here was not describing life itself?K. is the stranger who appears out of nowhere in sleepy village, a drifter, no one knows his past nor his goals. He is cold and rational and shows an uncanny ability to disarm with his arguments, winning a few hearts and minds in the process. The story, however, really takes off in Chapter 5 and 6, in which K. meets with the village mayor and the landlady, and the ensuing passages contain some brilliantly constructed dialogues. Everything in the village appears to be painfully slow, plain, mundane and yet at the same time deceitful and inexplicably complicated. Trying to reach the inaccessible fabled castle, K. finds himself in an absurd and strange existential drama and rebels.

[Paul Lyons · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A masterpiece, and the translation reads very well, to my ear. I never realised that Kafka could be so gripping and so funny. There's a great deal of sardonic humour that fits with the grim atmosphere. The depiction of bureaucratic manipulation and impenetrability is timely in this age of fake news, deep state, new world order etc. but the book's real power lies in its portrayal of a world in which every means of transcendence is blocked by an illusory transcendence (the Castle.)

[ubiquitousuk-784690 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Kafka succeeds in subjecting the reader to the same tedium as his protagonist. The book has a nice atmosphere in places and does a decent job of world building, but should have been a 150 page novella rather than a 300 page unfinished sprawling mess of single-paragraph verbosity.