The Castle

From Goodreads

The Castle
Franz Kafka

I enjoyed The Castle more than I thought I would. Generally, in fiction, I like to be transported away from the minutia of life. Kafka drops you right into the nitty-gritty minutia without giving you a proper map. Like, K, you put together the facts you are given in a logical way only for it to make sense without having any relevance in reality. It's like Kafka has created the rationally inescapable, shown that the rationally inescapable is the real and then revealed the real to be completely false, but still might actually be true. Who is misinterpreting the events? Obviously, K because he doesn't understand the inner workings of how things are done. But, then again, the people he interacts with only understand the inner workings through their exceptionally narrow, provincialist eyes. Maybe K is right and everyone he talks to or interacts with in the town is wrong. Maybe K is obviously wrong and everyone from the town is right. Worse still, maybe everyone is wrong. Even worse, everybody is wrong and there being right or wrong is inconsequential. Kafka stretches out the inane to the absurd to the point where up is down and left is right. In that stretching his characters become obviously warped without them realizing they are warped. It perfectly sums up every day life.

It took me longer than I thought it would to finish this book. The book isn't that long, but it seems to be never ending. Kafka might still be adding to K's life if he were alive today. Given the manuscript ends mid thought, Max Brod's addition on to how Kafka thought it would end seems abrupt. But, it might be the abruptness that makes it even more real. Life is an endless cycle of strange and mundane events that take on their strange qualities, not by the inherent strangeness of the event itself and more from the strangeness our warping minds give it. This goes on indefinitely until death and then abruptly, there is no more mundane. There is only the end.