The Castle

Towards the end of January 1922, Franz Kafka began work on his last monumental work, the novel The Castle. However, the work remained unfinished and was published posthumously by his friend Max Brod in 1926. The number of possible interpretations of the mysterious occurrences surrounding the land surveyor K. is legion. The Castle has not only been interpreted across thousands of pages of literary criticism; it has also been dramatized, made into a musical, and frequently filmed. 

The castle, whose contours were already beginning to dissolve, lay as still as ever, K. had never yet seen the slightest sign of life, perhaps it was not even possible to make anything out from this distance, and yet his eyes demanded it, refused to tolerate the stillness. 

Franz Kafka, The Castle

Everything that can be said about this book is just a groping aside. A person must glean for oneself how, line by line, the ominous severity of the final verdict emerges from an often lovely coexistence of irony and reverence. 

Hans Sahl