Customer Reviews
Dark, Surreal, and Very Very Relevant - By: Graham Mccarthy, 30 Oct 2008 
The Castle is more surreal & consequently more disturbing than Kafka's more famous novel, The Trial. The Castle appears to be an allegory for government bureaucracy & the law &in this respect will resonate with anybody that has dealt with government or a telephone company. It is a very dark story of a man's life of frustrationsin the face of unrelentingly Byzantine bureaucracy.
This is my favourite Kafka novel & it is frustrating therefore that one must read itin translation, but mainly because Kafka never finished it, indeed it ends mid sentence. Kafka gave up on this book & it was Kafka's close friend Max Brod that completed it & to an extent commercialised it. Butin a way, this chimesin with the unnerving narrative & is yet one more device to de-stabilise the reader.
Once read, The Castle will stay with you & you'll find yourself comparing much of what happens to youin modern life to the Sisyphus like existance of Joseph K.
A frustratingly pseudo-Kakfaesque review? - By: BeHereNow, 08 Sep 2008 
I came to read Kafka much later than I expected. And for reasons only half-known to myself I wrote my review even later. By then it seemed that there was no need for another review. And yet here is a review, which I find myself writing.
It is an irony that Kafka, once unknown, was considered SUCH a great literary figure by the time I came to know of him -- so much so that I expected to be disappointed with his work. And yet when I read it, I found it to be a work about disappointment!
One of the other reviewers may be correctin saying that the "Emperor has no clothes!". Yet how fine are his imaginary silks! Therein, for me, lies the genius of this novel. It never bluntly says "Look! Naked Emperor!"; instead it describes the imaginary silks with such artistic finesse that one is not quite sure if they are imaginary or not.
If this review made no sense to you, it is because I am not as great a writer as Kafka. But then that is a given, since I am merely a Reviewer & then not even one appointed as such.
Read the book & you might understand. Frustrating, no? It was for me! (Edited 6 times.)
Emperor's new clothes denounced - By: A. C. Dickens, 29 Jan 2007 
The story doesn't amount to much: K arrives at a village having been offered employment as a Land Surveyor by the local castle. But there seems to be no job for him, & he stumbles through a series of dreamlike days & nights trying to make sense of his new existence. The book is unfinished, & reaches no conclusion. In fact, the book could go on for ever.
The book makes little sense. K should have gone home as soon as the reality of his position came home to him. Some of the incidents are dreamlike, reminiscent of Alice. The two assistants, who seem to change shape & personality. The instant click with barmaid Frieda, engagement to her. The wealth of irrational & unexplained rules. And although the village seems very poor, no-one mentions money, & nobody ever pays for anything.
What is the author trying to say ? Is he making a point about bureaucracy ? Or about the numbing trivia of everyday life ? Whatever it is, he takes 400 pages of sledgehammer monotony to say it. Every page is leaden & uninspired. The sitcom Yes Minister told us more about bureaucracyin one 30-minute episode, & did it amusingly & watchably.
Or perhaps Kafka is complaining about the way people buttonhole you & pour out their troubles to you for hours on end without any consideration for how boring they are. This happens a lotin the book. At one point Olga talks incessantly for 14 pages to K. Kafka must have come across this a lotin his job as insurance man.
Whatever the intention, I think this book is a total failure, simply because it is so boring. There is hardly any varietyin the narrative, everyone sounds exactly the samein the way they speak, hardly anything happens, & there is a minimum of description to liven up the narrative; & no-one goes anywhere except to other parts of the village.
I think it's about time Kafka's bubble was blown. I give this book a total raspberry.
One star because Kafka was an innovator. But like many innovatorsin literary forms, Kafka was superseded by others who improved on the form. (eg Jules Verne deserves recognition as an SF writer, even though his books are poor compared with those of his successors).
"It's so hard to tell what's what, K." - By: Sam Tyler, 15 Oct 2005 In the era of New Labour doublespeak & the extension of the paraphernalia of the State at the expense of individual liberty, Kafka has never been more relevant. His world is a blackly comic nightmarein which the individual is oppressed by the sheer impenetrability of the bureaucratic state, where all our actions amount to no more than footprintsin the snow, & are open to a multiplicity of contradictory interpretations, where nothing is at it seems - but is not as it doesn't seem either! A world where our best laid plans are constantly undermined & sidetracked by the mundane minutiae of daily life, a world of complex determinism which negates any notion of blame or responsibility, where the apparent exercise of our own free will at the expense of others can be excused on the grounds that we could have made no other choice. A world where the language of officialdom turns out to be meaningless - "Sir, you interpret the letter so thoroughly thatin the end nothing is left of it but the signature on a piece of paper." It is a world that is at once absurd & yet recognisable to anyone who has had any prolonged dealings with government agencies. The mysterious bureaucracy that inhabits the castle could standin for the CSA, Inland Revenue, Tax Credit offices, or any other agencies where the decisions of junior officials, themselves insignificant cogsin a Heath Robinson machine they themselves can't understand, are able to hold sway over the lives of those that have become dependent on their seemingly arbitrary decision-making processes - agencies who cannot admit the possibility of error even as they launch interminable investigations into that non-existent possibility, while floor to ceiling piles of files crash to the groundin a comic routine of haphazard officiousness.
After another fruitless attempt to engage with the mysterious Klamm, K. refuses to be ushered away, "no longerin any hope of success, purely on principle." As the lights go out he is left feeling "as if all contact with him had been severed & he was now freer than ever before, no question about it, & might waitin this otherwise forbidden place for as long as he liked & had fought for & won this freedom as few others could have done ... but - this conviction was equally as strong - as if at the same time there was nothing more futile, nothing more desperate than this freedom, this waiting, this invulnerability."
The novel remains unfinished - Kafka had directed that it should be destroyed on his death (he might have guessed this would be taken as a request to publish!) - yet one wonders how such a novel could have ever been 'finished', tailing ofin mid-sentence seems entirely appropriate.
Das Schloß... let’s get ready to ramble! - By: Jonathan James Romley, 14 Feb 2004 This is one of Kafka’s most impenetrable narrative constructs... a book that puts away with the stark storytelling & literary devises of the Trial & instead, broadens the more poetic aspects of the Metamorphosis - as well as drawing on his often fractured short story work - to create a surreal, allegorical parable that,in the words of another reviewer, offers everything & nothing simultaneously. The world of the novelin pure Kafka... with autocracy & bureaucracy pushed beyond their reasonable limits, infecting & affecting the charactersin various ways & ultimately, creating an atmosphere of decay & paranoia that hangs constantlyin the background, like a sick reminder of the character’s absurd futility.
It’s bleak stuff, made bleaker by the writer’s use of descriptions & choice of subject matter. His work is categorised as being without colour, & certainly this is true when we read his work back. The world that is conjuredin our imagination is like a combination of Lynch’s Eraserhead, Gilliam’s Brazil & Soderbegh’s own film of the writer’s life & work (which saw actor Jeremy Irons portraying both Kafka & his literary alter ego K.in a stunning example of self-reflexity). We can actually see the worldin which the writer abandons us - leaving us without guidance or clues for the most part of the book - as a noirish underworld populated by a cavalcade of characters, each with shadowy-ulterior motives.
The book takesin elements of black comedy & farce, which does, to an extent, lighten the mood... though the continual bombardment of surreal encounters, arcane descriptions & literary puzzles means that the humour is the last thing we respond to. As others have previously stated, this is a difficult book to get through on the first reading, requiring a great deal of concentration on the part of the reader to work through Kafka’s many multi-layered musings. Don’t despair however; this isn’t quite the bottomless pit that you might imagine it to be from my description. There is a great deal here to enjoy, it may just take a while for the writer’s world & characters to sink in. Needless to say, burgeoning Kafka fans will love it!
