zeerooth reviewed The Castle by Franz Kafka
A theatre of absurd social norms, assumptions and bureaucracy
4 stars
K. arrives at a snow-covered village, enshadowed by a castle, hoping to start a work there as a surveyor. His arrival immediately attracts the attention and suspicion of the locals. While at first he receives a room and assistants to help him in his work, what follows is, what can be described best, as a series of misunderstandings, conflicts and reproaches. As it turns out, nobody at the village knows why K. was even summoned there in the first place, as there is no need for the surveyor at all. However, it could not have been a mistake, as the bureaucratic machinery at the castle never makes mistakes. In attempts to clarify this situation, K. tries to get a hold of his supposed superior, but he’s never allowed to talk to him directly. Castle gentlemen are seemingly too important, too sensitive and have too much work for such a meeting …
K. arrives at a snow-covered village, enshadowed by a castle, hoping to start a work there as a surveyor. His arrival immediately attracts the attention and suspicion of the locals. While at first he receives a room and assistants to help him in his work, what follows is, what can be described best, as a series of misunderstandings, conflicts and reproaches. As it turns out, nobody at the village knows why K. was even summoned there in the first place, as there is no need for the surveyor at all. However, it could not have been a mistake, as the bureaucratic machinery at the castle never makes mistakes. In attempts to clarify this situation, K. tries to get a hold of his supposed superior, but he’s never allowed to talk to him directly. Castle gentlemen are seemingly too important, too sensitive and have too much work for such a meeting to happen. K. then talks to lower ranking officials, who only muddy the waters more, struggles with his childish assistants, gets engaged to the mistress of said superior, tries to send messages to him through a messenger, who almost always comes back hopeless and empty-handed, gets kicked out of the inn and has to take a temporary position of a janitor in order to have a place to sleep and so this entire farce goes on, with things usually not turning out well for the protagonist.
Throughout the book Kafka describes, with great detail, the absurdity of how castle officials work, how villagers revere them almost like gods, how they have to assume so many things, how many unspoken rules there are among them, which leads to incessant conflicts with K. who is a newcomer. However, this is also, in my experience, what makes this book pretty difficult to follow and understand at times. There are entire chapters of nothing but one or two characters monologuing and often describing deep hypothetical scenarios and debating a certain topic, a certain rule, with no real action or actual conversation, which often made me go back and reread the page to fully grasp the concept.
In conclusion, I quite liked “The Castle” with its spectacle of absurdity, a deep fear of not being able to fit in and be understood that it managed to invoke in me at times, with so well-written characters and their exaggerated traits, but reading this book was not easy. Like with other Kafka works, “The Castle” also doesn’t have a real ending, it cuts off in the middle of a sentence. Oh how I wish to know how Kafka wanted to conclude this story and also the story of “The Trial”, but this, unfortunately, is going to remain a mystery forever.
