The Trial( Reviewed by Naveen Tanwar)

The Trial 

by Franz Kafka

Reviewed by - Naveen Tanwar

This classic book by Franz Kafka, which could have gone unpublished had there not been a man named Max Brod who made the scribblings of a disturbed man public, is certainly not a bed-time read. Kafka, who died at 41 is said to have left one of the chapters unfinished. Kafka’s bone-dry wit and flair for surreal humor make this dark and depressing novel at times funny.
The book, set in a gloomy European city, is about Joseph K. , a man who has been unfortunately been arrested by the oppressive government without ever letting him know what he had supposedly done wrong. Joseph, throughout the book, keeps encountering events he can not understand and at times he can not suspect.
Franz Kafka is frequently identified with 20th century expressionism which brings in subjectivity which varies with different characters rather than cold objective reality.
The colours of reality perceived by Joseph are tinted by the lens of his mind because of which what appears depressing and gloomy might be very normal for others.Expressionist writers often present the real world as bizarre and fantastic as such is the type of reality perceived by their characters.
In the book, government is the all-pervasive force which is unaffected by random individualistic happenings and determines the destinies of its men, justly or unjustly.In a way The Trial is a visionary novel which warns mankind of the adverse implications of the then upcoming totalitarian governments in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. With the construction of the Death Chamber in 1998 which encompasses all the tyrannies envisaged by Kafka, to carry out sentences against men who are unaware of the specific charges against them and unable to take part in the proceedings, there is no other suitable time to read the book. It is not that Kafka has glorified popular democracy by doing this. He attacks all forms of governments including democratic ones which take the help of clumsy bureaucracies to run the state.
The trial is a book of self realization. Rated as one of the top existentialist novelists of all time, Kafka has created a character who is isolated by the faceless government and is left lonely and friendless. The only “first sin” of Joseph K. is to believe in what he was being told by the government and to actually believe that he was guilty. Being an unmarried man despised by his father and who was a jew at the time when anti-Semitism was gaining popularity in Eurpe, Franz Kafka was all primed to write a novel on isolation. The similarities in Joseph and Kafka himself make this book arguably by many a fictional account of his own life.