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zenocononAug 31, 2013

...or, read The Trial by Franz Kafka for a more apt summary

ethicsengineeronJune 19, 2018

Engineers need to read The Trial by Franz Kafka. I don't think people fear soulless beurocracy without any possible resolution enough.

ifdefdebugonMar 21, 2017

Sometimes it feels like Kafka's The Trial is where the US court system takes most of it's inspiration from...

vidarhonApr 19, 2013

Perhaps not quite as extreme as Kafka's vision, but some parts of the case does seem about as ridiculous. (anyone who haven't read The Trial should, Kafka is fairly accessible)

eruonJuly 21, 2010

Yes. Although The Trial can also be read as a piece on his engagement. But Kafka was quite familiar with bureaucracy -- he worked for one.

okketonJuly 7, 2017

There are some free ones from Kafka on Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=kafka

In english I see there "Metamorphosis" (also as audiobook) and "The Trial".

thorinonApr 23, 2016

Probably the trial (kafka) or the plague (camus) but the one book I struggle to put down to put down is l'etranger as it's so easy to read in a single sitting and do compelling.

neadenonAug 30, 2017

On the other hand if Max Brod had listened to Kafka we wouldn't have The Trial, The Castle, or Amerika along with much of the authors other work.

swombatonOct 8, 2008

How about some real books?

- Narziss & Goldmund, by Herman Hesse

- One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marques

- Crime and Punishment, by Dostoievsky

- The Trial, by Kafka

- L'étranger, by Albert Camus

If you want to build your character, read the real stuff: fiction.

xamuelonJuly 7, 2017

Kafka only wrote 3 novels, all unfinished, all excellent.

"The Trial" is the conventional starter Kafka novel. It's the only one with an ending.

"The Castle" is my favorite. A good entry if you think you already understand Kafka (you may be surprised).

"Amerika", or "The Man Who Disappeared", is an under-appreciated gem but should be read 3rd because it's the least complete and you'll need the practice appreciating unfinished novels.

adaisadaisonSep 25, 2020

Same here. I read the Trial this summer too. It felt much in the same vein as Ecclesiastes did.

Vanity of vanities.

wolfgkeonApr 9, 2019

> I had no idea code bodies have been doing this... incredible. Requiring private individuals to pay a private entity for access to the law under which they are bound is unconscionable, to say the least.

In particular for people who are able to understand German, I recommend reading "Franz Kafka - Vor dem Gesetz" (Türhüterparabel - gatekeeper parable):

> https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/erzahlungen-i-9763/16

English translation:

> http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html

Here a narrated version (German):

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77JLmS6diaE

This parable is also part of the novel fragment "Der Proceß" (The Trial) by Franz Kafka - a novel that I can also highly recommend:

> https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/der-prozess-9771/1

English translation:

> http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7849

0xcde4c3dbonJan 5, 2016

At least in retrospect, this doesn't surprise me. If Kafka had been a 21st-century American, he probably would have written a novel about medical billing instead of The Trial. An incomprehensible cost structure represents, in some sense, infinite risk. Why wouldn't people be hesitant to engage?

FillardMillmoreonOct 22, 2019

The Trial by Franz Kafka? Color me curious - what about that book is relevant to the experience of young people today? From what I remember of the book, a young man is put through criminal proceedings for an unnamed crime that he was not made privy to - and it essentially encapsulated what a bureaucratic and litigious dystopia of a society would look like - but again, I'm curious how you draw the connections between that to the experience of young people today.

PimpusonOct 21, 2019

I'm reading The Stranger and finding it very relevant to our times. It's a depressingly boring read, but it gives an accurate insight into the way most young people are experiencing life. Worth a read if for nothing else than to identify which of your attitudes are too eerily similar to the main character's. Also highly recommend The Trial for similar reasons.

chipotle_coyoteonJan 5, 2020

While I certainly don't think all things in the digital space map perfectly to things in the analog space, there's literally centuries of precedence for descendants of someone who's deceased to make decisions about publicly releasing their journals, correspondence, unfinished manuscripts, and so on. Most of Emily Dickinson's poems were published after her death by her sister; author John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer-prize winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces was discovered and submitted for publication by his mother after he committed suicide; Franz Kafka's The Trial was only published because Kafka's executor defied his dying wish to burn his unpublished works.

tl;dr: I don't think the ethical questions here are affected by whether the deceased's writing takes the form of ink on paper or bits on digital storage.

megablastonJuly 20, 2010

Everyone should read Franz Kafka's The Trial. This story and The Trial depict the helplessness anyone can feel with our legal system, or any big bureaucracy.

jschwartzionFeb 18, 2021

The other component is decoupling health care and dental insurance from employment. Because that's a far bigger problem than retirement. A lot of people lost their jobs last year and suddenly had to pay full price on their insurance to keep going to their doctor.

The whole insurance system in the US is best described as a real-life re-enactment of The Trial by Franz Kafka.

geraldbaueronJune 16, 2017

That's a fantastic initiative to offer world literature. FYI: A while ago I've started the World Classics Bookshelf - http://worldclassics.github.io The idea is to use plain text with markdown formatting conventions (for richer typography e.g. beautiful quotes, em-dashes, etc.). See The Trial by Franz Kafka as an example -> https://github.com/worldclassics/the-trial (in the Manuscripts plain text source format). The second idea is to use a (standard) static website builder (e.g. Jekyll) for building the online books (from markdown) and to offer different book / page designs (kind of like the Zen of CSS Garden e.g. the Zen of Book Designs). See https://github.com/bookdesigns for some examples incl. the "classic" GitBook style -> http://bookdesigns.github.io/book-git Anyways, keep up the great work and publishing public domain world classics. Cheers.

xamuelonJuly 11, 2018

>In 1988 she sold the manuscript of The Trial for $2 million, at which point it became clear that one could turn quite a profit from Kafka

To some, $2 million would be a bargain for, say, a new Kafka novel.

The conspiracy theorist side of me has often wondered whether maybe Kafka did it intentionally. Intentionally left his novels unfinished, intentionally started a legend that he requested them to be destroyed unpublished, etc. It would certainly resonate with the tones and themes that permeate his works. Perhaps he himself realized that no ending could possibly suit a novel like "The Castle" better than the unfinished lack-of-ending he gave it, which makes our hearts yearn so strongly for an ending, and which is such a great parallel with the futility of the novel itself.

tuxcanflyonAug 16, 2013

“One must lie low, no matter how much it went against the grain, and try to understand that this great organization remained, so to speak, in a state of delicate balance, and that if someone took it upon himself to alter the dispositions of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating reaction in another part of its machinery – since everything interlocked – and remain unchanged, unless, indeed, which was very probable, it became still more rigid, more vigilant, severer, and more ruthless.”

― Franz Kafka, The Trial

dangonOct 7, 2018

Max Brod: When Kafka read aloud himself, this humor became perfectly clear. Thus, for example, we friends of his laughed quite immoderately when he first let us hear the first chapter of The Trial. And he himself laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further. Astonishing enough, when you think of the fearful earnestness...

http://web2.law.buffalo.edu/faculty/westbrook/KafkaLaughter....

KednicmaonSep 13, 2020

It's funny how religious folks always go for the body horror. There's no existentialism here; no Kafka's "The Trial", Camus' "The Stranger", nor Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" to force us to contend with each other and our cold vast empty universe. (Indeed, reading each of these three authors today, we are forced to grapple with their sexism, racism, and theology, because like all humans they were deeply bigoted and hateful.)

onethreeonJuly 23, 2013

coincidentally i had almost the same situation happen to me (hired as a dev, project kept getting pushed back and back, had no work to do for 4 months). i spent my time reading books from project gutenberg, one ofthem being The Trial

programminglisponJan 9, 2019

Never cross my mind to. I associated with Franz Kafka and his book The Trial .

aportnoyonOct 6, 2018

I've read The Trial and couldn't help but think that Kafka is overrated.

AnimatsonJuly 5, 2016

While waiting for Google to resolve this, I suggest reading
Kafka's "The Trial", or the Beckett's "Waiting for Godot".

monsterixonMar 26, 2012

I totally agree with you. But that doesn't mean NOT to opine on a story that's as sensitive as this. And probably look the other way when an individual (Kim, in this instance) has to undergo suffrage (and a completely unproductive period in life) simply because of a TRIAL?

Reminds me of The Trial by Roger Waters, Pink Floyd.

stepvhenonOct 7, 2018

I read The Trial, and I am an avid reader of literary fiction. I understand that the trial was published posthumously, and against Kafka's wishes. These facts track, for me, because I feel The Trial was unfinished, unpolished, and most of the time, not very good.

The whole time Joseph K. expounds his innocence, but still acts a total jerk to everybody he can, and at every opportunity. Being a jerk isn't exactly a crime, but its never clear what level of law the novel is operating on, and so its wholly reasonable to suspect K. is completely guilty, which changes the whole narrative (and for the worse)

The first chapter is wonderful and all that good "Kafkaesque" material people harp on about. Then the meeting with the priest where Kafka essentially provides a dialogue and commentary on one of his own short stories; enlightening, and entertaining. But past that nothing jives right.

The knowledge of his hecka abusive father doesnt serve the novel either. From the real world information, it only takes a few small adjustments to make The Trial as an allegory for child abuse, and the rationalizations and bitter remorse associated with it into adulthood. Kafka, as a person, was treated terribly for little to no reason, by an authority he was subject to. Kafka assumes his innocence, and presumes the authority was wrong, until eventually his mind is beaten down enough and the abused believes that the abuse is deserved. Not to mention the natual tendancy to assume parents, even abusive ones, arent actually as bad as they seem (to a child, at least). Goven tvat reading, the mystery of interpreting The Trial dissapates, and a grim and more common than desired account remains.

I guess my frustration with The Trial is not the novel itself, or Kafka himself, but the circumstances of its publication (which, again, in its shambolic presentation, show), and of the "prediction of future bueraucracy" ascribed to it, both factors external to the author.

But on subject, kafka is sorta funny. In a dark and/or cynical way. But I find him more sad and pitiful, both his work anf the author himself.

mjnonSep 15, 2013

I recently read one of Victor Hugo's shorter books, The Toilers of the Sea, and quite enjoyed it. I like Hugo's writing in general: has a rich feeling of time and place, with the style of the sentences he crafts sort of feeding into it. He's not exactly underrated in general, but I don't meet many people in my circles who read his novels.

I also recently read Kafka's The Trial, which I've long known about but never read, and it was good but not at all what I expected. For some reason I expected Kafka to be an intimidating, serious writer, based on how his name has come to be used metaphorically. But The Trial is a very easy read, engaging and plot-driven, moving along at a fast pace. You can read it in a few hours, and it feels like light reading, despite having some serious content.

krueger71onJune 2, 2020

I'm rereading The Trial by Kafka

_carl_jungonAug 29, 2019

It reminds me of The Trial by Kafka.

namirezonOct 6, 2018

I read The Trial a few years ago and found it a true masterpiece. I can understand that everyone doesn't share my opinion, but for me Kafka's stories hit too close to home. Many of us have been socially conditioned to have a false sense of autonomy and control, but this is not a universal and timeless phenomenon. If I were to chose my all time favorite authors, they would be Kafka and Camus.

huxleyonJan 30, 2016

I assumed it was a reference to Kafka's The Trial

xamuelonJuly 11, 2018

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.

rainhackeronFeb 12, 2017

kafkaesque : The Trial by Franz kafka

geraldbaueronMar 26, 2017

FYI: A while back I've started to put together a world classics bookshelf using plain text w/ markdown formatting and auto-published with a GitHub Pages (Jekyll) theme - see http://worldclassics.github.io Still early (e.g. world classics for now include The Trial by Franz Kafka and
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.) Cheers. PS: The idea is that you can easily change the book design (thanks to markdown and github pages/jekyll themes); see https://github.com/bookdesigns for more (free) book designs.

kafkaesqueonFeb 3, 2014

Have you read The Trial? Josef K was arrested basically without trial, as well.

In fact, I read this article and I see many parallels to the novel by Franz Kafka.

The reason I quoted it was because the following (from the article) reminded me of it:

"Latif sank deeper into depression and hopelessness as the futility of the legal efforts towards winning his freedom became clear. In one of his last letters to his lawyer he tells him: 'Do whatever you wish to do, the issue [of my defence] is over', and includes with it a message of farewell written both to him personally as well to the world at large: 'With all my pains, I say goodbye to you and the cry of death should be enough for you. A world power failed to safeguard peace and human rights and from saving me. I will do whatever I am able to do to rid myself of the imposed death on me at any moment of this prison... the soul that insists to end it all and leave this life which is no longer anymore a life'".

Josef K thought the law was accessible and would protect him, because he was innocent--so there is nothing to fear, right? Wrong. The excerpt from above is taken from a central piece of The Trial--the parable "Before the Law", which was a conversation Josef K had with the priest.

Franz Kafka studied law. He thought it was made to confuse the layman and that the law was not blind and balanced, as the statue so famously demonstrates, but rather has wings and shifts.

Though The Trial is a work of fiction and Latif is a real man, when I first read this book, it helped me realise and gain more compassion towards those who have been treated unfairly by the law.

ktizoonJune 14, 2012

The 'nothing to hide' arguments almost always seem to focus on the individual, but the full power of mass surveillance is not really about the control of specific individuals, but rather about control of the group. Just as in the measurement of temperature, where the motion of individual atoms is unimportant compared to the average, so the information gathered about single people is unimportant compared to the ability to accurately measure the group. If you want to hunt down single actors you do not need cameras everywhere, you just need to infiltrate their social circle. But to influence entire societies and to learn how to steer them is something that requires a ton of hard data on as wide a range of people as possible. Kafka's The Trial might be the perceived effect on the individual, but Asimov's Foundation series would seem the ultimate political aim of these kind of policies.

shantlyonDec 16, 2019

Hopefully I'll knock at least a couple off my "most shameful not to have read" list:

- Paradise Lost

- The Divine Comedy

- The Aeneid

- Moby Dick

- Middlemarch

- Othello & at least the lesser Henriad

- Any of several Russian novels, of which I've read none (War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment probably being the biggest)

- Kafka's The Trial

- The Canterbury Tales (I've read Sir Gawain & The Green Knight but not this, WTF is wrong with me?)

- Don Quixote

tompccsonDec 15, 2019

This reminds be so much of the novel The Trial by Kafka. The sinister feeling of a machine beyond anyone's control or comprehension was a commentary on authoritarianism and bureaucracy but it fits just as well, if not better to our age of computers making decisions in ways that will become increasingly hard to scrutinise. I hope this outcome finds its way into case books worldwide as a warning about placing too much faith in computer testimony over old fashioned human character witness and jurisprudence.

gnulinuxonJuly 11, 2018

The 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.

swombatonDec 23, 2008

EDIT3: If we're going to go with fiction, this looks like a good list to pick from:

http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/6.Best_Books_of_the_20th_...

Personally, I've read almost none of these!

1) How can you have read none of these? Get started already! And don't wait for others to tell you which books to read!

2) That list is very suspect... I don't know how they compiled it, but it's a bit strange that it does contain some good books but then simultaneously allocates several positions to enjoyable but trashy books such as Harry Potter. Also gives several position to LotR (one is warranted, no more!), including one for the Silmarillion (wtf? I enjoyed it, but "best book of the 20th century"? no way!) Memoirs of a Geisha is also nice but hardly a thought leader. And it seems to be completely missing immortal masterpieces such as Narziss & Goldmund (Herman Hesse), Joseph and his Brothers (Thomas Mann), The Trial (Kafka), and many others.

An "OK" starting point, but not even the shadow of a definitive list.

jljljlonJan 26, 2014

Mao and Marx altered the course of nations. Freud and Weiner created fields which have had a major impact on medicine, education, social theory, and technology, and may of those impacts have trickled down into everyday life.

You can make an argument against The Trial and 1984, but I'm skeptical many people will agree that they were less influential than any of the books you listed.

daknaonOct 28, 2020

> But this is fully automated bureaucracy. Except instead of having well known rules or human bureaucrats we can confront

Reminds me of a novel that was written over 100 years ago:

> The Trial (German: Der Process,[1] later Der Proceß, Der Prozeß and Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka between 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously in 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.

klezonJuly 11, 2016

Not in order

1 - Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)

2 - The Trial (Franz Kafka)

3 - Beyond the door (Philip K Dick - short story)

4 - The eyes have it (Philip K Dick - short story)

5 - Seven brief lessons on Physics (Carlo Rovelli)

6 - I have no mouth, and I must scream (Herlan Ellison - short story)

7 - The art of simplicity (Dominique Loreau)

8 - On anarchism (Noam Chomsky)

9 - The difference engine (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling)

10 - Utopia (Thomas More)

11 - Sophie's world (Jostein Gaarder)

12 - Rete padrona (Federico Rampini - essays about the 'dark side' of the corporate web)

13 - The art of discarding (Nagisa Tatsumi)

14 - Symposium (Plato)

And a couple of very short philosophy booklets by Zizek (about the Matrix) and Baudrillard (about 'cyberphilosophy')

kriskrunchonJuly 13, 2020

I know this as the Kafka trap fallacy.

"A Kafka trap is a fallacy where if someone denies being x it is taken as evidence that the person is x since someone who is x would deny being x. The name is derived from the novel The Trial by the Austrian writer Franz Kafka."

Source: https://debate.fandom.com/wiki/Kafka_Trap

RuleAndLineonJune 11, 2013

I've been looking for that holy grail, the persuasive rebuttal against the "nothing to hide" argument. This is it, for me.

Well, this plus the analogy to Kafka's The Trial that I picked up from, I believe, that Chronicle article that passed around a while ago.

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...

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