The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)

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.