Yes! I agree. My favorite Kafka story. It gave me the sense that Kafka reached a new level. It seems so perfect yet on the verge of falling apart from how loose it feels. As if Kafka took such a risk with this one, only to find he passed through unscathed. The Castle is the very moment Kafka transcends allegory and reaches the point of confession. Not in an autobiographical sense, but in a spiritual sense. Great review.

Wuaooo! Astonishing simplicity and strong delivery on such deep analysis. Loved it! Produce more like this, brother

The Castle (Franz Kafka), film by Konstantin Seliverstov kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ftNdrMdoy6muYYk.html The Trial (Franz Kafka), film by Konstantin Seliverstov kzfaq.info/get/bejne/iadpfbepy7XLcZ8.html

I think one of my favourite aspects of this book is that absolutely everything you learn is contradicted later on. Even down to if K is even a Land Surveyor or not. I would be interested to know peoples thoughts on this. K reads like an opportunist trying to insert and ingratiate himself within a society and he will go to any length to achieve this. He claims he was summoned by The Castle as a Land Surveyor and that his assistants are on their way, but when he is awoken by the Castellan and told he is in breach of Castle protocol his response is “What village is this I have wandered into? Is there a castle here”. Only after the castellan tells him off a bit more (all while supplying K with information to fuel his lie) does he invent that he is a land surveyor, therefore getting his foot in the door. I read an interesting analysis somewhere (unfortunately I forget where and it is phrased much more eloquently in the original article) that compares The Trial and The Castle. Both cover similar themes of struggle against vast incomprehensible bureaucracies but with one key difference: The Trial is a system imposing itself on a man and The Castle is a man imposing himself on a system. Kafka is my favourite author and nobody else chats about him with me, hence I turn to the internet 😂

That was an impressive analysis of Kafka's book! Let me add to your thoughts the element of alienation, which in Kafka's oeuvre has a religious tint (think of his attitude towards Judaism), and of course the trenchant critique of bureaucracy- a theme Kafka knew very well as he was employed in insurance law firms.

Great video! I'm ashamed to say that I've started this book twice now and have yet to finish it. The first was many, many years ago, and the more recent was last year. I got lost in the "plot" and thought that perhaps I had missed something, but now I don't think there was anything to miss. I loved the book's beginning, the overall atmosphere, and the world-building, though I now realize that I had was wrapped up in the expectation that K was going to steadily progress towards his goal. Ha! The book is still on my Kindle, and I am now curious to revisit it just where I left off. I think that Kafka is an author whose influence I've always appreciated, and though I like the themes he tackles, I find his writing very...cumbersome, for the lack of a better word. I can't force myself to fall in love with his style, or anyone else's for that matter, but I will likely always reach for his works, as I always find something new in them. I will end with a recommendation of another tale of an upward climb: Ted Chiang's short story "Tower of Babylon."

Thank you so much.❤❤❤ I just finished reading 'The Castle' for the first time. Initially, I was puzzled by the slow pace of the plot, and some parts seemed unrelated. However, I couldn't stop reading because it made me laugh at times. Eventually, I began to see things from different perspectives and even recognized aspects of myself.

Just finished reading The Castle. I have to whole hardheartedly agree that the best part (perhaps even the climax?) is when Olga recounts the events that happened to her family and Amalia. It was a really interesting point of view on guilt, honor and forgiveness. I feel like this will be a book that I will have to revisit later in life. I read the book with a friend and he pointed out all the religious references. Perhaps how K himself could be a Messiah that was sent to the village on mistake and is no longer needed.

I’ve interpreted The Castle as the story of not only the imposition of said bureaucracy on an individual (and the daily struggles that pertains), but why would a character such as K.’s would be chastised by these bureaucracies. K. seems to display and intermix of adoration and hate towards The Castle. His hate towards The Castle is that it locks his future and therefore ability to access The Castle in the first place, and the want to enter it is the adoration. This can be seen through all characters in the novel. K.’s struggle is not one of accessing The Castle exclusively, but of accepting The Castle’s authority and the position in society he’d been designated. It might be that Kafka is suggesting that as one fights against a bureaucracy out of the want to join it will only learn to accept said authority. That is further perpetuated in Chapter 2 when K. analyzes Klamm’s letter: “but he did fear the force of his discouraging environment, he feared getting used to disappointment, he feared the imperceptible influence of every passing moment…” Also, I really enjoy the amount of contradictions in this novel. Almost every single evaluation by K. about a character is later disproven, and characters’ stances and moods change abruptly as do the dynamics of power in each scene, like the castle’s warden portrait in the Bridge Inn, a seemingly definite object whose very presence changes the dynamics of power between Hans and K. Overall, very good review.

Great review of a book I have yet to read. But from the review reflecting my personal experience, it could easily be an allegory of a bureaucratic act like planning approval in some countries.

This is Kafka's best novel.

To me its the best book ever written about these absurd societies in which we live in where nobody knows what it is all about but we all contribute to support the senseless structure.

Published posthumously, the last work of Franz Kafka's distinctive creative opus, according to critics, a canonical work of world literature. Fundamental work of world literature according to content? Psychological characterization of the characters? Yeah, we'll get to that. An artwork of socio-contextual conditioning of an epochal period? There may be certain indications of the exemplary mysticism of the bureaucratized state apparatus, but they are left open to the intellectual daring of subjective objectification; devoid of examples, in the absence of comparison, paradigmatically apostrophized as metaphors that are metaphorically presented with elements of other metaphors - the original metaphor: "castle (clerk's office), in whose rooms (offices) the aristocracy sleeps or is served beer (managers and clerks performing urgent administrative tasks jobs, crowded with documents)". Criticism of society described in the semantic expression of the stylization of literature as the only mechanism of the epochal period, without ending up in the "castle room of some tray on the night hearing". So called, "a novel of breath", a rich linguistic expression summarized in the spasm of a single sentence, supported by an exhaustive knowledge of man and his social interaction, evoked through an astonishing sense of the subjectivity of observations and the succinctness of the depiction of social relations. Beyond the above, the structure of the sentence is a vain intellect, completely stripped of external content. The author places the protagonist Jozef K., a state surveyor, in the center of the novel, who comes to the village to become the same surveyor. In hopeless attempts to achieve this, the hero falls in love with a local innkeeper, who briefly becomes his fiancée after "falling" on his shy gaze. Using elementary means, establishing contacts, social flattery, manipulative communication relations, and timely arrivals at certain places with certain people, K. tries to establish a connection for a conversation with manager Klamm in order to decipher the letter, by which he is to become a municipal surveyor. Having engaged in several social conversations completely irrelevant to his goal, he reaches the ultimate domain of his endeavor, realized in a meeting with the municipal mayor, who explains the content of the letter and the circumstances of his arrival to him in an exhaustive manner, leaving the possibility of different interpretations, yet simple-mindedly clear indications "to the village there is simply no need for another state surveyor". The relationship with Frieda is diametrically opposite, whether it was a complete crush or a feeling of true attachment, which is created and diverged on that basis. The betrothed are trying to transcend themselves and bypass the social circumstances that created them; Frieda is a respected innkeeper and one of Klamm's lovers, moreover, she enjoys being where she is, Josef K. is a state surveyor who does not perform the work of a surveyor, so he is nothing more than a school tray. Although Frieda decides on a romantic attachment and goes after the school tray, the matter dissolves during one of Frieda's monologues, in which Frieda uses rational reasoning to explain to K. that she is serving him for social use because of her contacts with Klamm. Frieda, in the true emotion of her being and attachment to Jozef K., asked him: "Say that it's not true? K.: I have to go get lunch for the teacher."... The novel is a written description of the aristocracy of the middle class framed by numerous conversations, a breakdown of the psychological and social characterization of the characters, superficial features, flat interiority, archetypes of external social rationality arising from the repressed instinct of mere survival (them well known), using the logic of reason that is woven into their bones and from those same bones that are their driving force - their being is the conceit of the working masses, the proletariat - about which they never speak. The novel's dialect is a tapping speech on the social scale degraded to a village whisper.

Love your comparison to an immigrant’s journey. Hadn’t thought of that. Very cool.