توضیحات
The Trial (German: Der Process) is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky‘s Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative.[1] Like Kafka’s two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending.
After Kafka’s death in 1924, his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde‘s 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.
Plot summary
On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K., the chief clerk of a bank, is unexpectedly arrested by two agents from an unidentified agency for an unspecified crime. The agents discuss the situation with Josef in the unoccupied room of his fellow lodger Fräulein Bürstner, in the unexplained presence of three junior clerks from Josef’s bank. Josef is not imprisoned, but left free to go about his business. His landlady, Frau Grubach, tries to console Josef about the trial. He visits Bürstner to explain the events, and then harasses her by kissing her without consent.
Josef finds that Fräulein Montag, a lodger from another room, has moved in with Fräulein Bürstner. He suspects that this is a coy manoeuvre meant to distance him from Bürstner, and resolves that she will eventually fall for his charms.
Josef is invited to appear at the court’s address the coming Sunday, without being told the time or location. After a period of exploration he finds the court in the attic of a dilapidated working-class tenement block, at the back of a young washerwoman’s home. Josef is rebuked for his lateness and mistaken for a house painter rather than a bank clerk. He arouses the assembly’s hostility after a passionate plea about the absurdity of the trial and the falseness of the accusation, despite still not knowing the charges. The proceedings are interrupted by a man sexually assaulting the washerwoman in a corner. Josef notices that all the assembly members are wearing pins on their lapels which he interprets as signifying their membership of a secret organisation.
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