The Trial

⚖The case for it

Josef K. wakes on his thirtieth birthday to find warders in his room eating his breakfast while he hunts for his identity papers, and nobody will say what he is charged with. Readers describe an opening that behaves like a mystery and then refuses to. What Kafka builds from there is atmosphere; he "so uncannily got the atmosphere of a bad dream," one reader says, arbitrary rules and deadpan non-sequiturs that never break character. The cathedral parable stands on its own as the passage people argue over for years. And the machine still runs: readers reach for automated rejections and "computer says no" to describe how exactly a novel from 1925 anticipated being stonewalled by an institution with nobody in it to argue with.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

K. keeps grabbing and kissing women he has just met, "a super weird habit," as one reader puts it, and the women around him exist mainly to complicate his case. Around that runs the machinery: "technicalities about rules, norms, proceedings, pleas, advocates and officials," which reads to many as "a great wall of text." Each chapter reruns the same argument with a new official, so the book circles where it should build, "overflowing with details, dialogues, and digressions that lead nowhere." Kafka never finished it, and the seams are real, chapters breaking off and characters vanishing. "If I don't get it who gets it?" one reader asks, suspecting the legend of the papers Kafka wanted burned does more work than the pages.

— the honest librarian

7h

honest hours

10

sittings