Some books are an escape from reality. You finish them and it’s like you’ve been to a magical world of invigoration and life. Other books make you view your own world different. You’ve lived in the head of someone else and their perspective colours everything you see for a few days before you slowly merge back into yourself.
And then some books are The Trial, by Kafka, which act like an anti-escape from reality.
The Trial is often described as a nightmare, which certainly feels appropriate. It describes a world where each turn leads to more confusion and discouragement. It is the literary equivalent of waking up tangled in your sheets covered in sweat, except for the fact that the main character is never able to wake up from his situation.
Which is where the truly nightmarish part of the book comes into play: it feels real.
We’ve all had dreams that feel real. You wake up and stare at the wall, wondering if it all really happened. Maybe you google if your hometown was bombed or if your best friend really did die in a plane crash… and with relief you realize it was all a dream. By lunchtime you’ve completely forgotten about it.
The Trial is like that except you can’t forget it because it feels true. The never-ending twists of the Law in the book are unsettling because they feel so much like our every day life. Sure, the ordinary person isn’t navigating a criminal trial, but then why is it so easy to relate to Josef K? Especially since he’s such a pretentious bore and nobody should relate to him?
Because we’re all trying to figure out what we’re doing, what we’ve done wrong, why bad things keep happening, and why nothing seems to be getting better. Every time we seem to figure something out it ends up wrong. There is always someone higher up making decisions that seem nonsensical but completely change our lives. This is the treadmill that Josef K is fighting against and it’s what eventually kills him.
Is Josef K given answers at the end? No.
Are we given the answers at the end? No.
And so we put down the book and it’s like waking from a nightmare, except when you go to google if it really happened you learn that things are much worse than you ever could have dreamed.
FRANZ KAFKA’S “THE TRIAL” — 10/10 would highly recommend