THE TRIAL: The Definitive Edition

Kafka, Franz

ISBN 10: 0394704843 / ISBN 13: 9780394704845

Published by Vintage Books, 1969

About this Item

Book shows common (average) signs of wear and use. Binding is still tight. Covers are intact but may be repaired. We have 75,000 books to choose from -- Ship within 24 hours -- Satisfaction Guaranteed!

Seller Inventory # mon0000933899

Bibliographic Details

• Title: THE TRIAL: The Definitive Edition
• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication Date: 1969
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394704843
• ISBN 13: 9780394704845
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

The Trial is a novel by Franz Kafka about a character named Josef K., who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed, is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime.

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