The Trial (Vintage classics) - Softcover

Kafka, Franz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749399554 ISBN 13: 9780749399559

Publisher: Minerva, 1992

Synopsis

The story of Joseph K., a respectable clerk in a bank, who is suddenly arrested and asked to defend himself against a criminal charge which is never defined.

About this title

Review

"Kafka's 'legalese' is alchemically fused with a prose of great verve and intense readability."
--James Rolleston, professor of Germanic languages and literatures, Duke University
"Breon Mitchell's translation is an accomplishment of the highest order that will honor Kafka far into the twenty-first century."
--Walter Abish, author of How German Is It

"This short novel has passed into far more than classical literary status.... In more than one hundred languages, the epithet "kafkaesque' attaches to the central images, to the constants of inhumanity and absurdity in our times.... In this diffusion of the kafkaesque into so many recesses of our private and public existence, "The Trial "plays a commanding role."
--From the Introduction by George Steiner
"Here we are taken to the limits of human thought. Indeed, everything in this work is, in the true sense, essential. It states the problem of the absurd in its entirety."
--Albert Camus

[I]t seemed as though the shame was to outlive him. With these words The Trial ends. Kafka s shame then is no more personal than the life and thought which govern it and which he describes thus: He does not live for the sake of his own life, he does not think for the sake of his own thought. He feels as though he were living and thinking under the constraint of a family . . . Because of this unknown family . . . he cannot be released.
Walter Benjamin
Breon Mitchell s translation is an accomplishment of the highest order that will honor Kafka far into the twenty-first century.
Walter Abish, author of How German Is It"

"'[I]t seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.' With these words The Trial ends. Kafka's shame then is no more personal than the life and thought which govern it and which he describes thus: 'He does not live for the sake of his own life, he does not think for the sake of his own thought. He feels as though he were living and thinking under the constraint of a family . . . Because of this unknown family . . . he cannot be released.'"
--Walter Benjamin

"Breon Mitchell's translation is an accomplishment of the highest order that will honor Kafka far into the twenty-first century."
--Walter Abish, author of How German Is It

From the Publisher

'It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of that work that it offers everything and confirms nothing' Albert Camus

Edition details

• Publisher: Minerva
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0749399554
• ISBN 13: 9780749399559
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256