The Complete Novels: Includes The Trial, Amerika and The Castle - Softcover

Kafka, Franz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099518449 ISBN 13: 9780099518440

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2008

Synopsis

The complete novels of one of the greatest German writers of all time, collected together in one literary masterpiece.

Kafka’s characters are victims of forces beyond their control, estranged and rootless citizens deceived by authoritarian power. Filled with claustrophobic description and existential profundity, Kafka has been compared to a literary Woody Allen.

In The Trial Joseph K is relentlessly hunted for a crime that remains nameless.

The Castle follows K in his ceaseless attempts to enter the castle and to belong somewhere.

In Amerika Karl Rossmann also finds himself isolated and confused when he is 'packed off to America by his parents'. Here, ordinary immigrants are also strange, and 'America' is never quite as real as it seems.

THE CLASSIC TRANSLATION BY WILLA AND EDWIN MUIR

About this title

Product Description:

In America Karl Rossmann is 'packed off to America by his parents' to experience Oedipal and cultural isolation. Here, ordinary immigrants are also strange, and 'America' is never quite as real as it should be. Kafka, a Czech writing in German, never acutally visited America; so, as Max Brod commented, 'the innocence of his fantasy gives this book if advanture its peculiar colour.'Both Joseph K in The Trial and K in The Castle are victims of anonymous governing forces beyond their control., Both are atomised, estranged and rootless citizens decieved by authoritarian power. Whereas Joseph K is relentlessly hunted down for a crime that remains nameless, K ceaselessly attempts to enter the castle and so belong somewhere. Together these novels may be read as powerful allegories of totalitarian government in whatever guise it appears today.

Review:

"He is the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plaster saints in comparison to him" (Vladimir Nabokov)

"Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state, the paralysed, inadequately motivated, floundering lives of the many individual people; everything appeared as a nightmare and with the confusion and inadequacy of a nightmare" (Bertolt Brecht)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0099518449
• ISBN 13: 9780099518440
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 768