The Trial

by Franz Kafka, Rupert Degas (Read by)

Overview

The Trial is one of the great works of the twentieth century—an extraordinary vision of a man put on trial by an anonymous authority on an unspecified charge.

Josef K., thirty, lives in a large town in an unspecified country when he is summoned to answer a charge and appear in the courtroom for his trial. Franz Kafka evokes all the realities of trial without any of the specifics in a society that seems to have degraded into chaos: a squalid environment, rats, and yellow liquid shooting out of a hole in the wall. Guards, claustrophobia, anxiety—The Trial is a gripping story and an allegory of modern life that remains just as relevant a century after it was written.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781094014876
Publisher:	Naxos
Publication date:	01/14/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 5.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) is one of the best-known writers in the German language. He is especially famous for The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle, as well as his many shorter works. He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.

Date of Birth:

July 3, 1883

Date of Death:

June 3, 1924

Place of Birth:

Prague, Austria-Hungary

Place of Death:

Vienna, Austria

Education:

German elementary and secondary schools. Graduated from German Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	vii
Chapter 11
	The Arrest
	Conversation with Frau Grubach
	Then Fraulein Burstner
Chapter 231
	First Interrogation
Chapter 349
	In the Empty Courtroom
	The Student
	The Offices
Chapter 474
	Fraulein Burstner's Friend
Chapter 583
	The Whipper
Chapter 691
	K.'s Uncle
	Leni
Chapter 7113
	Lawyer
	Manufacturer
	Painter
Chapter 8166
	Block, the Tradesman
	Dismissal of the Lawyer
Chapter 9197
	In the Cathedral
Chapter 10223
	The End
Appendix I	The Unfinished Chapters
	On the Way to Elsa	233
	Journey to His Mother	235
	Prosecuting Counsel	239
	The House	245
	Conflict with the Assistant Manager	250
	A Fragment	256
Appendix II	The Passages Delected by the Author	257
Appendix III	Postscripts
	To the First Edition (1925)	264
	To the Second Edition (1935)	272
	To the Third Edition (1946)	274
Appendix IV	Excerpts from Kafka's Diaries	275

What People are Saying About This

Albert Camus

We are taken to the limits of human thought. Indeed, everything in this work is, in the true sense, essential. It states the problem of the absurd in its entirety.

W.H. Auden

Had one to name the author who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.

Walter Abish

An accomplishment of the highest order — one that will honor Kafka, perhaps the most singular and compelling writer of our time, far into the 21st century.
— Author of How German Is It

Introduction

This short novel has passed into far more than classical literary status...In more than 100 languages, the epithet 'kafkaesque' attaches to the central images, to the constants of inhumanity and absurdity in our times...In this diffusion of the kafkaesque into so many recesses of our private and public existence, The Trial plays a commanding role.
— From the Introduction

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
This classic novel by Kafka tells the terrifying tale of Joseph K., a respectable banker who is suddenly arrested and must defend his innocence against a charge about which he can get no information. The Trial stands as one of the great novels of modern times, as it rings with a chilling truth about modern bureaucracy and the mad agendas of 20th century totalitarian regimes.

The Trial is not for everybody, and its peculiar air of excitement will seem flat enough to those who habitually feed on 'exciting' books. It belongs not with the many novels that horrify, but with the many fewer which terrify.
— Books of the Century; New York Times review, October 1937

Louis Kronenberger

The Trial (1924), whose cryptic portrayal of a bank clerk detained and interrogated for an undisclosed offense has become perhaps the dominant image of modernist 'absurdity' — holds up well in a version characterized by long, crowded paragraphs and virtually incantatory accusatory repetitions that confer equal emphasis on the novel's despairing comedy and aura of unspecific menace. Admirers of Kafka's fiction will not want to miss it.

Kirkus Reviews

Those who defend the process… may offer absurd arguments, but they also state the case as clearly as it can be stated. All the humour of Kafka lies here, in the logical pursuit of absurd arguments.” —Zadie Smith

From the Publisher