The Trial

Author: Franz Kafka

The man said: 'Everyone seeks the Law, so how is it that in all these many years, no one has asked for admission but me?' The doorkeeper realized that the man was nearing his end, and to give him an answer despite his failing hearing, he shouted at the top of his voice: 'No one else could gain admission here but you. Because this entrance was meant for you alone. And now I will go and close it.' I do not claim that Franz Kafka, when he wrote the novel The Trial in 1914, foresaw the horrors of the two World Wars and the period in between. But with his extraordinary sensitivity and intelligence, he extracted from the simmering cauldron of Prague on the eve of the war everything he needed for his vision. And The Trial is the literary masterpiece that gave his vision its voice. Louis Begley - American novelist. Certain things from recent years just occurred to me, one of them had a clear impact: Franz Kafka's books, with their highly specific structure built with exquisite care, whether stories or the dreamlike novels like The Trial – they evoke fear, with their sarcastic dreamlike strangeness, with the precision of their architecture and their sickening emotional effect on the reader.