OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS The Castle

Be forewarned when you crack open this book. The mind must be prepared and focused, with no expectations of stability or calmness. And remember that anger management is to be dispensed with when encountering the townspeople of this novel, whose speech is never friendly, and whose intellectual capacities are almost completely atrophied. One could view them as a prank, as a dark joke perhaps from one or many of the Greek fates that influenced K into entering this miserable town, where it is clear that what he encountered has no value to him or anyone else.Atypical or not, whether they form a statistical outlier or not, there is not one character in the town that has any redeeming virtue, except for maybe as a warning, as an example of what to caution yourself against becoming. For your intellect and attitude to have any intersection with these people is to follow the path of intellectual and personal decay, a path that will be characterized and determined by cynicism, apathy, and xenophobia.Even if it is a structure of bricks and mortar, Castle Mount is a fiction, a place whose surreal inhabitants hold the populace in permanent intellectual bondage, with their minds polluted by an excess of veneration for authority, whether real or imagined. The populace, who are allergic to hospitality, where courtesy is never a part of communication, and who have no respect for themselves or their own potential, demand respect for Count Westwest, with the hair on their pathetic necks standing up straight when being confronted with anyone who does not show this unjustified and cognitively vacuous reverence.K prefers to be a free agent, and therefore residing in The Castle would (rightfully) compromise this freedom and its corollary of intellectual independence. Embedding yourself in organized bureaucracy with its simulacra and exaggerated and ephemeral displays of power and you morph into the organization, with your opinions not your own but rather belong to a collection of entities and social structures that have no legitimate function. But K does not have an impulse to prejudge things, choosing instead to demand evidence for assertions about livability and suitability. His mind is intact upon arriving. The townspeople have it as their goal to remove it as quickly as possible.Rather than a flock of crows circling around The Castle, it is more fitting to have a flock of vultures, who are ready to indulge themselves in its fallen citizens-those who have died a personal and cognitive death. It might be slim pickings for these birds though, as the skulls of the Castle dwellers will be near to empty, reflecting the lack of use of the neuronal apparatus, this being surrendered to the echelons of imagined power structures with their elitist and haughty view of common laborers who are undeserving of respect, who are invisible and indiscernible, like the F.F. Coppola maid of Mr. Waltz standing in his presence of the sitting consigliere Mr. Hayden, whose presence and humanity is never to be acknowledged.There are many lessons to take away from this book, the most important being to always be aware of the impact of discouraging surroundings, and don’t get used to disappointments, lest one conclude that existence is naturally a dark and hostile soup, the latter of which if not watched on the stove of personality will boil over and ruin one’s emotional and conceptual apparatus, and fill it with cynicism and despair.

カフカの作品はどれもいい、最長編のこれも期待を裏切ることはないだろう。

I enjoyed the book and it was definitely "Kafka"! But but but, this book is missing the last pages? It ends in the middle of a sentence so I don't really know how it ends with no more pages; the last page number is 275 and the next page is what appears to be the second page of the explanatory notes! A defective book or perhaps all of the books from this publisher are defective?

Excellent!

liked it a lot.not absurd as the "Trial" is, but symbolic, which I liked a lot.a great piece of work.I find it to be a continuation of the "Cathedral" chapter.Olympia