In the Library
The Castle
Franz Kafka, 1930
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 7 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Edwin and Willa Muir
- Chapters
- Chapters 18
- Length
- Length 97k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
It was late in the evening when K. arrived.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
Snow, and a village at dusk, and a hill with a castle on it that K. can see but never reach. He has come a long way because a letter summoned him: the authorities want a land surveyor, and he is the land surveyor they want. Or so the letter says. The village is not sure. The Castle will not say. What unfolds is the most patient nightmare in literature, not punishment, not pursuit, only the endless polite deferral of a yes that is always one office, one clerk, one signature further on. Kafka understood a particular exhaustion better than anyone: the exhaustion of holding a claim you know to be legitimate before a system with no mechanism to grant it. He died before he finished, and the book breaks off mid-sentence, which is the only ending the logic allows. The hill stays where it is. K. keeps walking toward it.