The Trial

The Trial is a really weird, surreal novel, and it was probably intended that way. It may even be fair to even call it an anti-novel: subplots start and don’t end, tension arises out of nowhere and then vanishes, weird time jumps that leave the reader in the dark. The intended effect is to put the reader in the same confused, overloaded state of mind as the character – as much as I appreciate that this was done for artistic affect, it did make the novel really hard to read. The main plot of the novel centers around K, a financier who is suddenly and without reason arrested, and his attempts to clear his name in hearings and dealings against a mysterious, bureaucratic Court.

This was a work that I had sensed more than understood it – Kafka’s surreal dreamscapes about the Court and its bureaucracy evoke the feeling of suffocation more than any other emotion, and stagnant air of becomes a powerful motif that is both explicit in one part of the novel and omnipresent, between-the-lines in other parts. The suffocation is always linked to the Court, whose bureaucracy is a result of combines overwhelming top-down power with the lacking of a unifying, galvanizing organizational mission. I felt that suffocation acutely dealing with some customer support and government agencies recently, and it had me thinking, if I’m going to build an organization as I’m doing now, sometime in the future when it’s mature, maybe there should be some way for it to divest all its power to something else – like, a self-destructing company that becomes many small parts after it’s grown and done what it was founded to do. Nothing more than a fancy for now, though.