Customer Reviews (1)

Classic Account of Alienation and Absurdity
Review of "The Castle" by Franz Kafka

This book made me into a Kafka admirer. He brings life to characters in otherwise drab situations and makes them seem very real. The reader feels the frustration, absurdity, the pettiness and the powerlessness in a personal way. You feel the haughtiness and aloofness of the Castle staff as if they were a part of your own community. You feel the pettiness and delusional gossip of the townspeople as if you were seeing it first hand. The story is riveting and the pace seems fast even when there is little action.

The story starts with the protagonist (identified only by his initial, K.) walking to what sounds like a routine surveying job. Soon he is frustrated by a very confusing series of obstacles. As the story develops the obstacles become more chaotic. K.'s original purpose in going to the castle is never fully elaborated and his motives seem lost or stolen. The forces acting upon K. are shrouded. It seems as if some invisible force has plotted to test K. to the limit of human endurance of tolerance of ambiguity.

Kafka combines the themes of:
social class commentary,
alienation from a heartless social system,
absence of any protective power,
salvation,
redemption,
fear of strangers,
fear of change,
search for the meaning of life,
inscrutability of authorities,
indifference of forces ruling human fate,
persistence in the face lost purpose,
abuse of power
and
acceptance of pointlessness goals.

As the plot progresses it takes on a surreal nightmare quality. Is the protagonist having a nightmare, going insane or confronting the reality of his situation?

There is no end to the frustration. We are never told if K. is having a nightmare or going insane. We never discover why K. is so determined to enter the castle that he would tolerate and even join in to the absurdity. His original purpose of doing a surveying job could never justify his struggle to gain admittance. We are left seeing K. as a perpetual outsider. Perhaps Kafka is telling us that there is no end or limit to frustration, alienation and absurdity. Those seeking an answer to the ageless enigma of existence will never find a simple resolution.

This is a disturbing work that challenges conventional notions of plot and character development while testing the readers conception of his/her purpose in life. The Castle will confront the reader in unexpected ways and raise emotional personal issues that would otherwise be repressed.

See:

The Metamorphosis

The Trial

Amerika

Collections:

The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Classics Series)

Collected Stories (Everyman's Library)

The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka

Blue Octavo Notebooks

Kafka's Selected Stories (Norton Critical Edition)

Give It Up: And Other Short Stories

Great German Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)

I highly recommend this book.

... Read more

Product Description
This volume also contains Kafka's letters, entries in Kafka's diaries and 10 critical essays. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

I teach from this edition
I first read this edition in a summer workshop for AP teachers at Carnegie Mellon in 1987.It worked for me then, and works for me now.I have used it the last 2 years in a public school International Baccalaureate course.Corngold's introduction, extensive endnotes, letters by Kafka and others, and selections from criticism are a great resource in helping students understand not only the various meanings one can derive from the novel itself, but also in helping them having in one place different ways of approaching a novel; that is, from various critical angles (biographical, psychlogical, historical, etc.), from viewing primary documents and, of course, head on.What a world Kafka creates.Who cares what it means, in the end.But this edition is helpful in giving kids their first solid clobber of explication.I also use Peter Kuper's comic novel (search for it here) to add one more perspective, though I have to say, Kuper's interpretation is easily my least favorite.A bit over the top on the grostesqueries, and not enough of Kafka's unspoken but powerful energy.I'm sure there are other critical editions which are fine too.Try them as well. ... Read more

Product Description
Acclaimed graphic artist Peter Kuper presents a brilliant, darkly comic reimagining of Kafka’s classic tale of family, alienation, and a giant bug. Kuper’s electric drawings—which merge American cartooning with German expressionism—bring Kafka’s prose to vivid life, reviving the original story’s humor and poignancy in a way that will surprise and delight readers of Kafka and graphic novels alike.

“A brilliant illustrated adaptation of Franz Kafka’s famous story. It’s a real pleasure to read and one in which everyone will recognize the existential drama and uncanny wit of the original text."—Susan Bernstein, associate professor of comparative literature and German studies, Brown University ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Peter Kuper + Frank Kafka = Awesome!
I'm familiar with Franz Kafka's novels and stories and I can say that they were great. Just as Peter Kuper added an amazing contextual, visual, and more humanly relatable touch to Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" his work on Frank Kafka's short stories is just as great. The visual element doesn't denigrate, degrade, or cheapen the quality of the material, as one would generalize that adapting classic literature to graphic novel form would; instead it elevates it to the level of making the stories more relatable, presentable, and available to those who wouldn't normally pick up a novel, but just may get interested in doing so afterwards, similar to my response to history books after reading Howard Zinn's "A People's History of American Empire" (the graphic novel adaptation of his history text "A People's History of the United States"; which I'm now sucked into.).

I give

Review of Kuper's 'Metamorphosis'
This is a fair adaptation of Kafka's original work. It is filled with the mood of a Kafka short-story. This short, readable piece would be a great introduction to Kafka for high school students (with a supplementary introduction on Kafka, which this work does not provide).

start with Kuper's "Give it up!" Kafka compilation...
dear reader, compared to Kuper's brilliant graphic interpretation / adaptation of Kafka's Give It Up: And Other Short Stories (also available in a paperback edition), his "Metamorphosis" is so literal / straightforward as to be weak."Give it up!" (etc.) is a far more rewarding read, and more profound graphically, than this seemingly more popular kuper adaptation of kafka's "metamorphosis".

The Metamorphosis
This book, not only a great alternative aspect to the classic version, really turned me on to graphic novels in general.Although I purchased this book for a literature class at school, I found its format fascinating yet entirely relaxing to read.

My English professor says he has raised all his 4 children on graphic novel versions of the classics.They're easier to understand and a great foundation for further learning.

Buggin' Out
Adapted from the nightmarish short story from early 20th-century author Franz Kafka, Peter Kuper's graphic novel version breathes new life into angst-ridden hero Gregor Samsa, an overworked young salesman who finds himself getting stepped on--figuratively--after waking up as a giant cockroach.While Kuper's writing seems simple enough, he also decorates the word bubbles to further distinguish each character.And what characters this book has!While the reader may find the Samsa family's reaction to Gregor's transformation to be natural, he/she may actually find Gregor's treatment to be deplorable regardless. And the rough black/white artistic style Kuper brings to the table merely adds the mood for an already dark, dreary story.A nightmare that goes on long after you wake up.

This comic is unrated: Adult Situations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Paradoxes of Older Testament, Greeks, and Imperial Era
The pieces here were posthumously gathered from Kafka's notebooks, diaries, letters, and short fictional works. Though generally short, they do seem to go remarkably well together.The pieces are arranged in 4 broad sections: the imperial area including the Great Wall and The Tower of Babel.("If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted."). There is a section that is Midrashic on the Older testament ("We are fashioned to live in Paradise, and Paradise was destined to serve us)".A favorite of mine was "The Animal in the Synagogue", though what the animal may symbolize is open for discussion. The section on the Greeks, introduces Poseidon, who has become a bureaucrat, checking "the last row of figures."And "Leopards in the Temple" presents another animal in another temple ... and "becomes part of the ceremony".The final section includes unrelated fragments such as "The invention of the devil" and"The truth about Sancho Panza". I found these pieces all heavy in irony and paradox, speaking of a wonderful and mysterious world, without some of the darkness of his longer work
Readers who enjoyed this would also enjoy Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges.

The essence of Kafka is here
The essence of Kafka is in these parables and paradoxes. In these short pieces many of them excerpts from longer walks we can feel the heart of his puzzling, mysterious, unique genius. Also in them we feel the way Kafka makes of a seemingly abstract argument a mystery story . There are parables on many different subjects, from Quixote and Sancho, to the Great Wall of China, and from Prometheus and the Vulture, to the Parable itself. Often there are variants of the parable and variants of the paradox and Kafka makes us feel not simply how elusive a single definition of a reality can be, but how wonderous and strange it can be also.
Of course in Kafka there is also dread , anxiety and a whole sense of the world as being somehow stranger than we can think or even imagine .Even the everyday details of life which Kafka is so much a master of making into parables of poetic beauty turn mysteriously into something else which we cannot really hold in mind or finally define.
Who reads this book reads a work of genius, the condensed essence of one of mankind's most original literary minds.
What a pleasure what a wonder what a dream.

From Kafka to Kafka there is no one like Kafka
These short pieces often excerpts from the longer works concentrate the essence of this dazzling most unique of minds, whose enigmatic questioning and trembling anxiety nonetheless behold and present the world with awesome uncanny beauty. In these little pieces we go to the heart of the Kafka riddle understanding that no paradox is ultimately paradoxical enough, or no parable parable- like enough to fully contain this mind.
If Genius is uniqueness then Kafka is the quintessential Genius, if Greatness is paradox and parable then Kafka is alone in the stars.

An activity book for thinkers
Amusement is likely to be the aim of most people who read this book, but those who can appreciate a deeper side, in those moments when our relationship with reality is in bad shape, might also study this book as a higher intellectual calling.If intellectuals in modern society have lost the high standing that they had when intellectuals could be expected to support basic norms, it might be due to their ability to identify with the level of mental acivity evident in this book more readily than with the norms of a society in which people desparately need to believe that they are being understood.First, I would like to recommend this book to people who would like to do some original thinking in the area of religion.In my own religious history, it was surprising how well I could identify with the Edgar Allan Poe-ness of my nature, whenever ultimate problems needed to be faced.I have come to realize that, for the intellectuals of the world, the works of Edgar Allan Poe are like a collection of worn out American horse feathers compared to the depth which can be imagined by those who read the works of Kafka.I'll vouch for that, too.

A good book to carry around and read while you're waiting...
Too bad this book is out of print.All of the stories are on the short side so it is nice to peruse when one does not have a whole lot of time to read but wants something stimulating.Sometimes they are only a page or so long but will leave you thinking about them for a few minutes - this book really engages the reader and encourages mental activity.I think Kafka's mysterious style is quite excellent, and I encourage anyone who has liked his other works to give tthis lesser known collection a chance ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

massive, penetrating
This is an enormous book, in more ways than one. At 810 pages, there is lots of material here, and events or issues are often brought up in more than one place, giving you a curious sense of having read something before. But this is to some extent an inevitable product of the subject: Kafka's life and literature are full of complex intersections of thoughts, feelings, obsessions, issues, events, relationships, etc., and Karl's densely woven narrative preserves and illuminates all this rather than smoothing it out. His discussion of Kafka's odd, intense, anxiety-filled connection with Felice Bauer is especially good: he dissects all the parries and ripostes of this ultimately pointless relationship, seeing them as reflecting Kafka's desperate need to plumb the depths of his own psychology through his impossible need for her (much more insightful than Elias Canetti's book on the subject). True, the book is massive and sometimes untidy, but for those who love Kafka, it is a uniquely penetrating read.

Inside the Torn Apart
I remember purchasing this 800-page monster with queasy forebodings.Its mere existence seemed an affront to the exemplary scholarship of Ernst Pawel and Ronald Hayman, as if the world of Kafka studies secretly desired Karl to take things up a notch with a "definitive" biographical study (if a definitional text can be so defined by sheer length and breadth).

Nevertheless, I identify very strongly with what Karl is trying to do here - not so much the overzealous attempt to crossbreed biographical narrative with academic criticism, but rather the bodying forth of an unmanageable style and rollicking critical panache (my own affliction), a work of epic design and hubris that, given its tortuous subject, is almost destined to flop.Karl wants more than anything to be a critical uber-stylist (me again), an innovatory and polyphonic commentator on this most shadowy of literary personae, yet throughout the 200+ hours I've devoted to his book, I can't help feeling that I've gotten no closer to the heart of Kafka's universe than K. the Land-Surveyor got to the crow-infested central tower of his Castle.

Franz Kafka, the 20th-century author whom I love and revere above all others, deserves a biographer as ferociously dedicated and metaphysically haunted as his subject. Karl's book, at its worst, is a muddled implosion of rehashed ideas and marginally original insights.There are too many dead spots, too many lazy correspondences and simpering cliches, too much recycled exegesis piddling alongside desperate attempts at ingenuity (Kafka's obsession with orality and digestion, the hyper-mastication of food, his hypochondriac obsessions, are touched upon at least once per thirty pages!).

There are some gratifying moments as well, however.Karl's reading of "The Village Schoolmaster" as a meditation on the vagaries of (dis)information, the iniquities imbedded in the lives of "quiet old people," and on culture's propensity to transmogrify "the `truth' with all the possibilities that transform every event into something false"(512), is criticism at its strongest.Karl also hits a high note with his chapter on Kafka's great epistolary novel, *The Letters to Felice*, working through the byzantine evasions and cruelly manipulative mind-games Kafka subjected his great love (and bitter nemesis), the unsuspecting secretary Felice Bauer, who was willing to forgive him his schizoid hysterics, so long as he settled into his ordained role as husband and provider.It was one of Kafka's most fruitful "literary" experiments, excruciating from beginning to end, and amply expounded by Karl in a 110-page chapter."Kafka is our poet of ordinary madness," Karl brilliantly notes, and does his best to limn the preceding century as a magnificently horrifying Kafkan Event, the world becoming so "when it relocates the individual in areas he or she could not have preconceived; when it redefines the terms of existence in unforeseen modes; when it resuscitates the terms of life in ironies and paradoxes that run askew to human will or purpose"(759).I'll leave it to the individual reader to decide whether this sentiment is ingenious, trite, simplistic, or merely vague.It is, I would say, fairly representative of this scholar's rhetorical style and comportment.

Sadly, Karl is unable to sustain the above level of adroitness throughout this marathon of a treatise, and all but flounders when it comes to analyzing Kafka's subtler and more elusive efforts.His dismissal of "The Hunter Gracchus" as "not [a] major work," for example, is simply too much to take.His similar shrugging-off of Deleuze and Guattari's pathbreaking *Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature*(1975), is another in a wide range of disappointments the reader must slog through.

Nevertheless, Karl's book has some great insights on specific texts and events.Beneath all the pandering hubris there *is* a semi-coherent narrative of Kafka's life, his relationships with women (transmuted into the cloying eroto-doppelgangers of *The Trial* and *The Castle*), the claustrophobic pressure-chamber of the Kafka household, the humiliations of his professional life, his patronage of the Yiddish theater, his Zionist aspirations, his readings of classic literature (Goethe, Flaubert, Kleist, and Dostoyevsky above all), and so on....

Perhaps my problem is that I just have a very personal and decisive idea of who and what Kafka is, an image I am driven to safeguard at all costs, against all intercessors.Maybe Karl (whose George Eliot biography I much prefer) isn't the obnoxious hack he makes himself out to be in these circular and overwritten pages.Or perhaps this book is meant to be read through relatively quickly, rather than pored over obsessively (as is my habit), stripping every sentence of its rhythm and panache.That said, I urge the potential reader to try and prove me wrong. ... Read more

Product Description
The definitive biography of the representative writer of our age

Although Franz Kafka (1883–1924) completed only a small number of works in his lifetime, perhaps no other author has had a greater influence on twentieth-century consciousness. This engrossing biography of the Czech novelist and short-story writer emphasizes the cultural and historical contexts of his fiction and focuses for the first time on his complex relationship with his father.

Nicholas Murray paints a picture of Kafka’s German-speaking Jewish family and the Prague mercantile bourgeoisie to which they belonged. He describes Kafka’s demanding professional career, his ill health, and the constantly receding prospects of a marriage he craved. He analyzes Kafka’s poor relationship with his father, Hermann, which found its most eloquent expression in Kafka’s story “The Judgement,” about a father who condemns his son to death by drowning. And he asserts that the unsettling flavor of Kafka’s books—stories suffused with guilt and frustration—derives from his sense of living in a mysteriously antagonistic world, of being a criminal without having knowingly committed a crime.

Compelling and empathetic, this book sheds new light on a man of unique genius and on his enigmatic works.

Nicholas Murray is the author of many books, including biographies of Bruce Chatwin, Matthew Arnold, and Aldous Huxley, a book of poetry, and two novels.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A responsible general biography
This biography of Franz Kafka can be recommended for the general reader in every way except one:it is not the best biography in English of Kafka or the one to read if you wish (as most people) to read only one.I preferred Ernest Pawel's "The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka," which has more color and passion and comes closer to bringing Kafka to life as a three-dimensional figure.(It may be out of print, but it can easily be found on the secondary market.)

Murray's biography is well-written, readable, and responsible, although a little dry and pedestrian.In addition to surveying Kafka's life satisfactorily -- via a somewhat artificial four-part structure (Prague, Felice, Milena, and Dora, the last three being the three women with whom Kafka had the longest and most meaningful relationships) -- Murray also discusses and properly places Kafka's literary works in the context of his life without ever engaging in academic literary exegesis.Thus, this is very much a biography for the general reader, and if the Pawel biography cannot be obtained, one need not hesitate about turning to Murray's. ... Read more

Product Description
This brief but inclusive biography of Franz Kafka and summary of manyof his works, all illustrated by Crumb, helps us understand the essenceof Kafka and provide insight beyond the cliche "Kafkaesque.""What do I have in common with the Jews? I don't even have anything incommon with myself." Nothing could better express the essence of FranzKafka, a man described by his friends as living behind a "glass wall."Kafka wrote in the tradition of the great Yiddish storytellers, whosestock-in-trade was bizarre fantasy tainted with hilarity andself-abasement. What he added to this tradition was an almostunbearably expanded consciousness. Alienated from his roots, hisfamily, his surroundings, and primarily from his own body, Kafkacreated a unique literary language in which to hide away, transforminghimself into a cockroach, an ape, a dog, a mole or a circus artiste whostarves himself to death in front of admiring crowds. David ZaneMairowitz's brilliant text and the illustrations and comic panels ofthe world's greatest cartoonist, Robert Crumb (himself no stranger toself-loathing and alienation), help us to understand the essence ofKafka and provide insight beyond the cliche "Kafkaesque," peeringthrough Kafka's glass wall like no other book before it. The book is awonderful educational tool for those unfamiliar with Kafka, including abrief but inclusive biography as well as the plots of many of hisworks, all illustrated by Crumb, making this newly designed edition amust-have for admirers of both Kafka and Crumb. Black-and-white comics throughout ... Read more

Customer Reviews (9)

This is an incredible biography of Kafka
This is a complete, full-length graphic novel biography of Kafka.In less than 180 pages, the life of this complex & very influential writer to later generations, is told with a completeness that satisfies this reader.His family life, his upbringing, the loves & unrequited loves of his life, his daily work, his influences,his fears, his loves, & his beliefs are all within these covers.His novels are reprised in just a few pages for each one.Aspects of his own life are used to mirror his novels.This is one incredible biography & should already be considered a classic of the graphic novel genre.

Fascinating and funny
I read "The Metamorphosis" in high school, and found Kafka too weird. Having read this book, I now appreciate his weirdness a little better. As always, Crumb's drawings are highly amusing, right down to the authors' self-portraits on page 175.

Crumb's art MAKES this book
I only got this because of Crumb and Igot an unexpected and enlightening education. Kafka could be a difficult and obtuse subject, but the insightful writing and Crumb's amazing art work make it understandable and fascinating. Only R Crumb could pull this off so well.

An Interesting Biography with nice comic book interpretation of Kafka's works.
This book is a biography of Franz Kafka. Throughout the book we get summaries of Kafka's important works and we get to see Crumb's visual interpretation of these stories. That is the best part of the book for me. The biographical side is also very good, explaining a bit of why Kafka wrote like that.

While reading the book, I felt like it is hard to call most of it a comic book, because it has a lot of prose. The parts of the book where we get to see Crumb interpret Kafka's stories definitely feel like a comic book, but the biography section doesn't. However, I thinks this works very well in the book, it makes the stories more alive when the images tell more than just being a drawing.

I enjoyed the book, it is worth reading.

Crumb Fan Must Have
If you are A Crumb Fan or Collect Crumb this is a must have.I bought it used from an approved Amazon seller and received it quickly and in very good condition!I had no idea who KAFKA was but once I picked it up I could not put it down. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The letter as integral part of the life- work
Kafka was one of the world's great letter- writers. His letters like his parables, his meditations, his fragments, his journals must be seen not as incidental and additional work but as an inherent part, a constituent center of his work. As a letter - writer Kafka has few equals. His metaphoric and poetic brilliance shine through time and time again. This collection may not have the focus of the letters written to a single person, as those to Milena and Felice Bauer but they also contain the line- by- line brilliance of mankind's greatest voice of anxiety and fear. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

SELECTED SHORT STORIES OF FRANZ KAFKA
Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka (1936), translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir, collects fifteen of Kafka's stories, including his most famous, "The Metamorphosis."

Kafka is, for the most part, doing his own thing with his writing. In other words, he wrote for himself rather than for any particular reader or audience; this is why he's often considered one of the more influential writers of the twentieth century, but it may also be why many of his stories weren't published during his lifetime.

Kafka's absurdist, existentialist style demands analysis and begs interpretation. Kafka's work offers an astounding depth of opportunity for critical interpretation, but if you can't be bothered to put in the effort, you aren't going to get much of anything out of his stories (a highlight here for the read-for-enjoyment crowd is "The Hunger Artist," one of Kafka's more coherent tales).

Many of Kafka's tales are little more thanphilosophical essays dressed up as stories, and the reader who is not of an academically literary mindset should be readily forgiven for finding many of these stories horribly boring and.

If you're looking for unique, groundbreaking writing full of potential for academic analysis and literary interpretation, Kafka is exactly what you want. If you're reading for enjoyment, you could scarcely do worse. In short, Kafka's not for everybody, and he's not for me.

Powerful.
Franz Kafka is a true genius, there is no other way to put it.The stories are very powerful and "intoxicating" is the oly way I can put it.This book would have gotten a 6, only for the fact that the booklacked more stories and better translating; this is the publisher's fault. This book is a great one to start with for people just picking up onKafka's works. ... Read more

Product Description
Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis climaxes in the very first line--the protagonist has indeed been transformed. The critical questions lie in the interpretation of the transformation. Kafka has been said to have offered everything from a psychological parable of Oedipal struggle to a caricature of psychological readings.

The title, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, part of Chelsea House Publishers’ Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics.This collection of criticism also features a short biography on Franz Kafka, a chronology of the author’s life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Points to the repulsion we have for deformed persons
Metamorphosis is a short read: it's either a long short story or a very short novel.But in these few pages Franz Kafka serves up an important theme--this is the way humans react when one of their children or parents suffers some medical condition that makes them repulsive to others.Pity the poor parents who have to raise a child with a serious facial deformity that makes them ugly.Pity the children whose own parents are suffering a fatal disease.In both cases, Kafka is saying that the human tendency is to hide the problem or to wish it to go away--i.e. for that pitiful soul to die.This is ghastly, but perhaps true.Think of the strain on a marriage when a deformed child is brought into the world--many such marriages don't last.In the case of the novel the family try to hide their son when he metamorphs into a beatle.They try to maintain their love for their son but find it impossible because their son's repulsive appearance overwhelms them.They soon prefer that the beetle, their son, die.The son's metamorphosis is a metaphor for this paradox faced by families of the sicked or deformed.Such a theme is deeply disturbing.But as Voltaire said, if you want to write a great book you must embrace a great theme.

A Surrealist Painting Transcribed
Franz Kafka was the truest writer of our time. This was because he never applied the label of writer to himself.He was not driven by anything other than to write, and keep in mind that he did not write for you toread; you've ventured into an untouched river.This is why you can notdistinguish the characters in his work with the man; they are the same. This story will confuse you like no other you have ever read, but if youcan give it meaning within your own life(and this scenario of a workaholicetc.,is perfect for the U.S.)then you will gain incite on Kafka, andrealize that you may also be one of his characters.

see a new dimension to the story
The book was great!!I loved how the characters seemed to "metamorphosize" into different characters by the end of the story.It's not only the story of Gregor's metamorphosis but a story ofhis family's metamorphosis as well.This book will keep you thinking andallows for extremely different views on Gregor's plight in the novel.

Kafka ignites reason in this book about the drudgery of work
As he starts realizing that he is living the life of one, Gregor Samsa wakes up one day to find out that he's become a disgusting insect.Or does he? Is the insect that he sees himself as, a product of his neuroticmind?

This book is wonderful in that small details tell a lot.It'sshort reading, though 3/4 of the book is just explanations and theories ofthe story.This book will make you think if nothing else.And books thatdo that are books that live long in the readers' mind after they've readthem--the immortal books. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
O Processo (Alemão: Der Prozess) é um romance escrito pelo escritor checo Franz Kafka, e conta a história de Josef K., personagem que acorda certa manhã, e, sem motivos sabidos, é preso e sujeito a longo e incompreensível processo por um crime não revelado.

Segundo Max Brod, amigo pessoal de Kafka, o livro permaneceu inacabado como estava quando Kafka lhe entregou os escritos, em 1920. Após sua morte, Brod editou O Processo pelo que ele julgou um romance coerente e o publicou em 1925.

Burocracia
O Processo apresenta ao leitor a narrativa carregada de uma atmosfera desorientada e avulsa na qual o personagem Josef K. está imerso. Tal atmosfera deve-se mormente à seqüência infindável de surpresas quase surreais, geradas por uma lei maior e inacessível, que está no entanto em perfeita conformidade com os parâmetros reais da sociedade moderna. O absurdo presente em toda obra é o ponto de partida, sem conclusão, da confusão que se desenrola na mente de Josef K., assim como em todos os ambientes reais nos quais ele está inserido, o que dá ao leitor a sensação incômoda própria do estilo da obra kafkaniana.

nesta versão incluimos em apêndice Capítulos incompletos eAs passagens riscadas pelo autor além dos Posfácios da primeira, segunda e terceira edição.

O AUTOR
Franz Kafka nasceu em Praga, em 1883. Embora escrever fosse sua paixão, ele nunca conseguiu fazer com que a escrita fosse seu meio de vida, e poucas de suas obras foram publicadas antes que ele morresse de tuberculose, aos quarenta anos de idade. Apesar de ser completamente desconhecido durante a vida, Franz Kafka é considerado um dos escritores mais influentes do século XX. Escrito originalmente na Alemanha em 1915, o conto A Metamorfose é considerado sua obra-prima.


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Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) is one of the most important and influential fiction writers of the early 20th century; a novelist and writer of short stories whose works, only after his death, came to be regarded as one of the major achievements of 20th century literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Farsa processual como só Kafka poderia criar
Excelente texto! K. alega ser inocente, e o sistema pergunta: "inocente de quê/"

É fácil encontrar nos livros de História e em depoimentos de muitas pessoas a mesma situação vivida por Josef K., basta lembrar de como os direitos individuais são tolhidos em sociedades como de Cuba de Fidel Castro; nas prisões de Abu Ghraib, no Iraque, e de Guantánamo. ... Read more