Richard Goscicki
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The Trial
- By: Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 834
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 626
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Story4 out of 5 stars 631
If Max Brod had obeyed Franz Kafka's dying request, Kafka's unpublished manuscripts would have been burned, unread. Fortunately, Brod ignored his friend's wishes and published The Trial, which became the author's most famous work. Now Kafka's enigmatic novel regains its humor and stylistic elegance in a new translation based on the restored original manuscript.
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5 out of 5 stars
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We are all the straw that breaks a camel's back
- By Dan Harlow on 10-14-13
- The Trial
- By: Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: George Guidall
Life Is Surreal
Reviewed: 11-11-18
Reading Kafka changed my life. I did a 180 from a Boston College conservative to an NYU radical. K's books and short stories, along with news events in the late '60s, convinced me that the state has its own agenda and the hard working individual isn't part of it. As hard as I worked to graduate in the class of 1966, the government said to me -- "Fine. You learned all about Voltaire, Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Now go over to the other side of the world and kill gooks, because rich corporate oligarchs don't like the wealth being shared." That's Kafkaesque. How many authors have eponyms as descriptive?
K's common thread is the plight of the individual on the steps of government offices. K never even learned what his crime was, and later in "The Castle", the seat of power, K learns that all entrances are closed. Klamm, the all-powerful autocrat, who controls everything that goes on, is aptly named: he doesn't say a word in 500 pages. He just pulls the strings of power. In the '50s when I read the book, I was reminded me of a disturbing movie I'd seen as a kid -- "Invaders from Mars." The all-powerful head (literally) Martian was an octopus head floating in a fish bowl. It would merely silently point one of its tentacles at one of its slaves and the individual would jump as if in a trance to fulfill the command.
Thirty years later, poet Allan Ginsberg would pick up the theme in his poem "Howl." "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?" So now, as a watch California burning down, I think of the sinister power of mind control. George Carlin would pick up the theme again fifty years after that: "They don't care about you. They don't care about you. They don't care about you!" He asked, what kind of people would destroy and desecrate such a beautiful countryside and replace it with billboards supermarkets and shopping malls? As a writer I think I know: a brainwashed people.
Being Polish, I always enjoyed an old Polish poem: I'm a fly helplessly caught in a spider web of red tape and bureaucracy. I thought I was a butterfly.
By the author of Saving Gaia, Pot Stories, and Mirror Reversal.
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