The Trial by Franz Kafka

Published posthumously in 1925 despite his request to the contrary, German-language novelist Franz Kafka’s The Trial explores the absurdities and anxieties that gradually came to define the twentieth century, including relentless bureaucracy, alienation, authoritarianism and meaninglessness. The text opens with the arrest of a young bank official, Joseph K., on the morning of his 30th birthday for an unspecified crime by unidentified men working for an unnamed agency. Upon his release begins a nightmarish trial with endless court sessions and no resolution in sight, threatening his personal life and relationships. Although incomplete like his other novels, Kafka’s The Trial is replete with the kind of bizarre and nonsensical administrative travesties beyond individual understanding or control that best explain the term ‘Kafkaesque’, well-known today even to those who are yet to become his readers.