[ book tip by Jade Weighell ] ‘Somebody must have made a false accusation against Josef K, for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.’

What follows this stark beginning is a hopeless search for the truth. Reading this novel is like walking through a darkened maze as K's every attempt to find justice is thwarted. He is constantly expected to know things he hasn’t been told and any answers he does receive only serve to create more questions.
  
The city in which The Trial is set is a dark and oppressive place and the law offices are claustrophobic and stifling attics where very little air or light penetrates. The constant feeling of suffocation symbolises the impenetrable fog that K has to fight his way through to find the truth.

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 to Jewish parents and this novel epitomises the feelings of victimisation and isolation that he would have felt living in such a tumultuous time. Kafka had difficulties forging an identity for himself as he had to portray a different self to different people, to his parents a Czech-speaking Jewish boy, to others a German-speaking academic. In the novel K becomes ostracised and his quest to receive acceptance echoes Kafka’s own need to know where he belonged.   
  
The Trial is work of absurd fiction. Writers of the absurd use heightened symbolism in order to try and find some sense of meaning to life and, as Kafka does, they use humour but the laughter is uneasy as there is always an uncomfortable truth lurking beneath.   

[ book info ] Kafka, Franz: The Trial. (Book language: English) Penguin Classics, Germany, 2000 (1925). ISBN: 0-140118290-3.