AUDIOBOOK
About
This new edition of Kafka's terrifying and comic masterpiece is the product of an international team of experts who used Kafka's original text and notes to render this story as close to the author's vision as possible. Kafka's final novel tells the haunting tale of a man's relentless struggle with authority in order to gain entrance to the Castle. The story of K—the unwanted land surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle and yet cannot go home—seems to depict, like a dream from the deepest recesses of consciousness, an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. A perpetual human condition lies at the heart of this labyrinthine world: dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, reason and nonsense, harmony and disintegration. An unfinished novel that feels strangely complete, The Castle uses absurd fantasy to reveal a profound truth.
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Reviews
"To read Kafka is always a surprising encounter. It shocks literary conventions and takes you with a jolt to the depths of the soul…The new translation by Harman restores Kafka to Kafka."
Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A major and long-awaited event in English-language publishing. [A] wonderful piece of news for all Kafka readers…Mark Harman is to be commended for his success in capturing the fresh, fluid, almost breathless style of Kafka's original manuscript."
Mark M. Anderson, Columbia University
"Sparkles with comedy, with zest, and with a fresh visual power…This is not just a new, brilliantly insightful, sensitive, and stylish translation, it is a new Castle, and it is a pleasure to read."
Christopher Middleton, University of Texas at Austin