Extract

It was late evening when K. arrived.

A land surveyor arrives in a village dominated by a castle on a hill and spends the novel trying to reach an authority that may not acknowledge his existence. Franz Kafka left this work unfinished at his death in 1924, and Max Brod published it in 1926, giving the world a parable so capacious it absorbs every interpretation without being exhausted by any. The bureaucracy is at once absurd and terrifying: officials sleep through appointments, messages go astray, corridors lead nowhere. K. persists with a stubbornness resembling faith. Whether the castle is God, the state, or the structure of meaning itself, Kafka's genius was to render exclusion so precisely that every reader recognizes it as their own.