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Binding: Library BindingDewey Decimal Number: 833.912 EAN: 9781439507452 Edition: Reprint ISBN: 1439507457 Number Of Pages: 481 Publication Date: June 26, 2008 Related Items: Alternate Versions: Click to Display Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Amazon.com Review: They are perhaps the most famous literary instructions never followed: "Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread...." Thankfully, Max Brod did not honor his friend Franz Kafka's final wishes. Instead, he did everything within his power to ensure that Kafka's work would find publication--including making some sweeping changes in the original texts. Until recently, the world has known only Brod's version of Kafka, with its altered punctuation, word order, and chapter divisions. Restoring much of what had previously been expunged, as well as the fluid, oral quality of Kafka's original German, Mark Harman's new translation of The Castle is a major literary event. One of three unfinished novels left after Kafka's death, The Castle is in many ways the writer's most enduring and influential work. In Harman's muscular translation, Kafka's text seems more modern than ever, the words tumbling over one another, the sentences separated only by commas. Harman's version also ends the same way as Kafka's original manuscript--that is, in mid-sentence: "She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said--." For anyone used to reading Kafka in his artificially complete form, the effect is extraordinary; it is as if Kafka himself had just stepped from the room, leaving behind him a work whose resolution is the more haunting for being forever out of reach. Product Description: The story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, 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. In his introduction, Idris Parry shows that duality-to Kafka a perpetual human condition-lies at the heart of this essentially imaginative magnum opus: dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, reason and nonsense, harmony and disintegration. Thus, The Castle is an unfinished novel that feels strangely complete, in which a labyrinthine world, described in simple language and absurd fantasy, reveals a profound truth. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - a dreamy, utterly inscrutable masterpiecei'm sitting in a cold, lonely room, headphones on, a lamp dimly gleaming on the nightstand next to me. i've just finished harman's translation of the castle, which i picked up from the library after finishing a muir translation i bought for 50 cents. the novel tells of the struggle of K., who believes that he's been invited to a town to do some land surveying, only to realize upon his arrival that his invitation was the result of a bureaucratic mishap. he wants answers from the officials ... Read More Rating: - A story of human isolation, of man's quest for freedom and validationFranz Kafka is rightly regarded as one of the great writers of the 20th century. His relatively few works have been reviewed and studied ad infinitum, so it may seem rather pointless for me to write yet another review. But I must confess to a personal bias: Kafka is one of the handful of writers that I can read over and over again, especially his shorter stories. His novels, such as The Castle, are harder going. Complex sentences make the reader focus on the words and the meaning of phrases. ... Read More Rating:  - Which translation?Kafka is one of my all time favorite writers, but try as I might, I can't get through the Mark Harman translation of The Castle ... it comes across like a laundry list of details, at least compared to the other versions I've read. A tour de force of literal accuracy, perhaps, but it just isn't funny. Rating: - I offer the startling proposal that Franz Kafka's The Castle isI offer the startling proposal that Franz Kafka's The Castle is, after all, about life as it is lived by all of us. The novel is difficult for us "post post moderns" for several reasons. The first is that the action is set in a time and place which no longer exist: Prague in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before and possibly during World War I. Kafka's readers were familiar with the social structure and physical description of the village and Castle of his story. But it ... Read More Rating: - hilarious, you really need to read it yourselfHearing about Kafka's work is not enough: you really need to read it and experience it yourself. It's hilarious, and unfortunately all too true. In this book, a surveyor, named K., arrives in a village and tries to get in to the castle in order to get permission to stay there and do his work, but falls into a quagmire of disfunctional bureaucracy. This may sound like a dreary read, but the book is really very funny, and reminded me too much of the real world. K spends most of the book on a fruitless ... Read More 
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