The Essential Kafka: The Castle; The Trial; Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Wordsworth Classics)

Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka’s world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is.

The Trial

• In The Trial, the rules are hidden from even the highest officials.
• If there is any help to be had, it will come from unexpected sources.
• This chilling, blackly amusing tale maintains, to the very end, a relentless atmosphere of disorientation.

Superficially about bureaucracy, it is, in the last resort, a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature.

The Castle

Still more enigmatic is The Castle:

• Is it an allegory of a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject?
• The search by a central European Jew for acceptance into a dominant culture?
• A spiritual quest for grace or salvation?
• An individual's struggle between his sense of independence and his need for approval?

Is it all of these things? And K?

• Is he an opportunist, a victim, or an outsider battling against elusive authority?

Kafka’s Fables

Finally, in his fables, Kafka deals in dark and quirkily humorous terms with the insoluble dilemmas of a world which:

• Offers no reassurance.
• Provides no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties.