3 ms·
He only did three novels, so you've already finished 1/3 of them. The Castle: The only difficulty here is some conversations take forever (probably because the
by xamuel 8y ago
He only did three novels, so you've already finished 1/3 of them.
The Castle: The only difficulty here is some conversations take forever (probably because they were never revised). I'd suggest just plowing through them the first time, your eyes might glaze over and you'll miss stuff in them but it's ok, you can pick more stuff up on later readings. I've read The Castle many times and I still pick up new stuff from it.
The Trial: There's really only one chapter that's difficult, the penultimate chapter set in the cathedral. You could literally just skip it, if you're having trouble with it. You'll miss some self-contained goodies like "Before The Law", but you can always come back later. It has been said that except for the first and last chapters, most chapters in The Trial can be rearranged and read in whatever order you like. I seem to recall someone even created some sort of physical version of the book where you could literally swap chapters around.
- gnulinux 8y agoThe Castle, I really liked, much more than The Trial, but I couldn't finish that either. I don't exactly recall where was I stuck but I remember literally struggling to read as if studying Algorithms or Machine Learning. I read it both in English and German with similar difficulty. The Trial was the only thing I read from Kafka that I found kinda meh and boring-ish, again made it a bit more than half way. I tried reading The Trial at least 3 times, maybe more, with same faith every time. (I eventually learned its ending in a literature class, but given other works of Kafka, it was very predictable). I'll give it a shot again and maybe skip chapters where I lose focus and come back later.