The Castle (Classics of World Literature) - Softcover

Kafka, Franz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1840221828 ISBN 13: 9781840221824

Publisher: Wordsworth Editions, 2009

Synopsis

Kafka's final novel was written during 1922, when the tuberculosis that was to kill him was already at an advanced stage. Fragmentary and unfinished, it perhaps never could have been finished; perhaps the tensions between K., the Castle and the village, K.'s struggle for acceptance or recognition by the mysterious Castle authorities or by the people of the village, never will and never can be resolved.

Like much of Kafka's work, The Castle is enigmatic and polyvalent. Is it an allegory of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire as it disintegrates into modern nation states, or a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? Is it the search by a central European Jew for acceptance and integration into a dominant culture? Is it a spiritual quest for grace or salvation, or an individual's struggle between his sense of independence and his need for approval? Is K. is an opportunist, a victim, or an outsider battling against an elusive authority? Is the Castle a benign source of authority or a whimsical system of control?

Like K., the reader is presented with conflicting perspectives that rehearse the existential dilemmas and uncertainties of literary modernity.

About this title

Review

Of all Kafka s fiction this is the most personal. K. is not of course a mouthpiece for Kafka he lacks Kafka s grave intelligence and humor but his inner conflict between a taste for ordinary life and the demands imposed by his quest were in good part shared by Kafka . . . The Castle projects a greater strength of will than we have encountered in Kafka s earlier writings an effort to overcome the muteness of existence. from the Introduction by Irving Howe

From the Hardcover edition."

"Of all Kafka's fiction this is the most personal. K. is not of course a mouthpiece for Kafka-he lacks Kafka's grave intelligence and humor-but his inner conflict between a taste for ordinary life and the demands imposed by his quest were in good part shared by Kafka . . . The Castle projects a greater strength of will than we have encountered in Kafka's earlier writings-an effort to overcome the muteness of existence." -from the Introduction by Irving Howe

From the Hardcover edition.

From the Publisher

'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

Edition details

• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1840221828
• ISBN 13: 9781840221824
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304