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The Trial Book Review

The Trial is a 1925 dystopian novel by Franz Kafka. It is one of his most important and best regarded works.

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“It’s only because of their stupidity that

they’re able to be so sure of themselves“

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It tells the story of Josef K. We never really get to know his real surname as the novel is emotionally distant in that regard. He is arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible, remote authority and he never realizes the real nature of his supposed crime. Although Kafka himself said that he was influenced by Dostoevsky, I personally don’t see the connection. The protagonist in ‘Crime and Punishment’ was guilty while K never did anything presumably, which was a huge distinction between the two works.

Where the novel falls more effectively is within the dystopian genre, especially along the likes of Orwell and his ‘1984’. There are many similarities between the two works and I bet that Orwell was influenced by Kafka while writing his most iconic novel. I prefer said work to The Trial for various reasons and I did find ‘The Metamorphosis’ to be better written and more engaging among Kafka’s works.

The main issue that I’ve had with this novel is its extremely cold and distant approach to storytelling that is also very scarce. Some of it was intentional in order to purposely disorient the protagonist and the reader, but still the book needed a better pace, structure and a more driven narrative that meandered more often than not.

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It’s not the most involving read out there, which isn’t helped by Kafka’s odd paragraph structuring in a sense that there were no paragraphs to speak of, but just lines on top of lines that never ended, making for a somewhat difficult read visually at least. He wasn’t great at descriptive passages, at least not in this story, but where he did excel at was the dialogue.

There were so many excellent conversations here that were actually quite interesting to follow and each new conversation revealed an important bit of new information, but those bits still piled on top of one another, leading to a never-ending conundrum of a case that perfectly fitted with the overall tone of the book that is very confusing and desperate.

The Trial deals with the ridiculousness of a justice system that becomes too convoluted and how dangerous that can be to those who are persecuted. A lot of the novel is rather absurd and that absurdity is the driving force of the story and the biggest highlight here. Everybody is controlled here, but they are all alienated from one another, leading to a supposed future where humans only use others for their own benefit and there is no personal connection to be fostered anywhere.

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The Trial doesn’t have the best characterization. In fact, it has weakly developed characters that fit the puzzling and mysterious nature of the story at hand, but still I needed more personality and development for them. The protagonist is a tragic figure and he is easy to sympathize with and root for, but we never get to know him besides his confounding case. The women aren’t that well developed while the various male figures that he meets along the way are important to the story and they are intriguing figures, but again they’re underwritten.