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Summary: Kafka is amazing.
Review: This translation is much better than the one by the Muirs
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Summary: Getting by in a dream world...
Review: Those like myself who seldom read fiction but enjoy looking at the world through different lenses may find the reading of this work rewarding. K's travails evoked memories of my time in the military (in Southeast Asia): nothing is as it appears, days of boredom are interrupted by moments of bewildering activity, people have whole menus of hidden agendae, one struggles to attain goals that later prove empty of significance, chance meetings turn out to have been pivotal, and apparently chance meetings turn out to have been carefully staged for one's benefit (or detriment!). K lives in a world very much like ours... where the puppetmasters are unknown strangers, and our companions turn out to be very unlike what they appear. If this novel has any practical value (heresy!) it is as a manual on techniques of 'how to navigate in the dark.' For those who doubt it, one can navigate in the dark, but one must use one's ears (distant sounds of crashing waves, the echoes of thunder, the direction of the seabreezes). The biggest obstacle to finding one's way is a full moon -- one can see the sea, but the stars (far more important!) disappear from view. ... All in all, I liked Kafka's book. As each of the characters around him reveal the reasons behind their bizarre behaviors, they become 'normal' humans, disappointing but less weird. K is in some ways a lightning rod, provoking his very upset neighbors into revealing the reasons for their anger and frustration with him. After awhile one doesn't even care any more about The Castle and its occupants; the village is more real and surviving in it is a lot more important than escaping from it.
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Summary: Readable at last!
Review: Translation means everything! Over the years I've read much of Kafka especially during adolescence and into my early twenties when his worldview spoke most directly to my own attempts to understand how the world really worked. Of all his books only The Castle totally defeated me. I must have begun it five times in my life, only to abandon it partway through. Now I know why. It wasn't Kafka. It was the translation.Mark Harmon's translation brought Kafka close to my ear and heart, the way he used to when I was younger. I could see the darkness of his interiors, feel the cold of his snow covered wind blown exteriors, smell the stale beer of the taproom, taste the small meals and strong coffee served, sense the animal []attractions of his characters. Most of all I could really hear the voices of his people as they simultaneously revealed and concealed themselves through their stories. Sometimes I laughed out loud. Sometimes my hair stood on end at the dark realities which this book unveils. The Barnabas family stories in particular chilled me. Especially in this time of fear and shunning by powerful majorities of the 'others'in our societies and in the exhaustion of the 'cleansings' and genocides of the last century, the fall of that family made me feel like I was inside a hateful part of our past, present and future.
I've now lived part of my life within bureaucratic organizations, even as an 'official' and I understand as I couldn't as a youth how absolutely Kafka has gotten to the deepest truths about how our power structures work. What it's like to be enmeshed as part of them, and-or to be at their mercy. It is hard to find free space in the world.
I used to think Kafka was a genius and an artist of the highest rank. Now, reading him in an excellent translation I understand that he was also a prophet.
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Summary: hunh?
Review: Well, those are some bizarre reviews already submitted. This is one the the greatest novels ever written. Beautifully written, with many and varied ideas. Anyone who doesn't like it is just plain odd. I suppose the problem is trying to explain the book. It isn't about any one thing. It's about everything. The whole world in a book. (One of maybe 5 books from the 20th century like that.) If you're not sure, then start with The Metamorphosis, a perfect work of art, and it's short, too, and easy to read. Fun for the whole family.
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Summary: The public misconception of Kafka
Review: Whenever asked who is my favorite writer, my response of Franz Kafka usually generates in the inquisitor a look of severity, as if I had responded with the most stifling and impenetrable answer imaginable. I have always been positively baffled by the public perception of Kafka as a "difficult" author, a "serious" author, one of those authors good for no one beyond college professors. This is simply not the case. All of three of Kafka's novels are thrilling, nightmarish, and haunting, to be sure, but they are also downright hysterical, containing countless moments of slapstick humor worthy of the great comics. Furthermore, Kafka's novels are probably the most compulsively readable of any I've ever read. I've yet to spend more than two days reading or re-reading one of the three novels, as once I'm drawn into Kafka's spell I have no choice but to finish (that previous statement obviously fits right in with Kafka's universe). I can't stand it when people consider Kafka "the guy who writes stories about people turning into bugs". The Castle is my favorite of Kafka's works, a novel so rich and beautiful, so full of crazy characters and imagination, it is the logical precursor to Roald Dahl and Tom Wolfe and Terry Southern and other writers of the comically absurd. Monty Python surely owes a huge debt to The Castle. The Castle is indescribable. There has never been another novel quite like it, before or after, and surely every reader will find it a different experience. It is a masterpiece in that it hints at serious post-modern themes and events, but remains ambiguous enough to take under its wing any number of interpretations. Great 20th century novels like Orwell's 1984 and Nabakov's Lolita probably won't stand up to future scrutiny the way Kafka's will, because Kafka is the only writer of the 20th century to succesfully represent the human experience through the form itself, letting the content and meaning transform entirely according to the reader.
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Summary: review of castle
Review: You people have not understood the book, it is supposed to be superfluous, annoying to read, too long, and unfinished.
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