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Cover of The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Trial

Franz Kafka

  • 269 pages · about 4 hours
  • First published 1925
  • 783 editions
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1 About this book

The Trial (German: Der Prozess) is a German-language novel written by the Czech-Jewish writer Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a bank official arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of the crime of which he is accused revealed neither to him nor to the reader. The novel shows K. as he tries to navigate through an absurdly bureaucratic legal system as well as his social alienation as he attempts to clear his name. Some similarities between The Trial and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov suggest their possible influence on it, and Kafka went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending.

Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  • Psychological fiction
  • Dystopian fiction
  • Classics
  • Fantasy
  • Trials (Murder)
  • Prisoners
  • Administration of Criminal justice
  • Totalitarianism

2 What to expect

A man is arrested one morning for a crime no one will name, and spends a year trying to deal with a court whose rules he can never learn. It reads as a nightmare told in calm, precise prose: absurd, sometimes darkly funny, and steadily more oppressive. Kafka left the novel unfinished, so some chapters are fragmentary, and it offers no explanation of its own meaning.

Good for readers who want: a modernist classic, bureaucracy as nightmare, and a strange, unsettling read.

3 About Franz Kafka

1883–1924

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-language Jewish writer from Prague. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his works fuse elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically feature isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe situations like those depicted in his writings.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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