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The Castle
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The Castle
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The Castle
Audiobook13 hours

The Castle

Written by Franz Kafka

Narrated by Allan Corduner

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

A land-surveyor, known only as K., arrives at a small village permanently covered in snow and dominated by a castle to which access seems permanently denied. K.’s attempts to discover why he has been called constantly run up against the peasant villagers, who are in thrall to the absurd bureaucracy that keeps the castle shut, and the rigid hierarchy of power among the self-serving bureaucrats themselves. But in this strange wilderness, there is passion, tenderness and considerable humour. Darkly bizarre, this complex book was the last novel by one of the 20th century’s greatest and most influential writers.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 1, 2010
ISBN9781843794066
Author

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (Praga, 1883 - Kierling, Austria, 1924). Escritor checo en lengua alemana. Nacido en el seno de una familia de comerciantes judíos, se formó en un ambiente cultural alemán y se doctoró en Derecho. Su obra, que nos ha llegado en contra de su voluntad expresa, pues ordenó a su íntimo amigo y consejero literario Max Brod que, a su muerte, quemara todos sus manuscritos, constituye una de las cumbres de la literatura alemana y se cuenta entre las más influyentes e innovadoras del siglo xx. Entre 1913 y 1919 escribió El proceso, La metamorfosis y publicó «El fogonero». Además de las obras mencionadas, en Nórdica hemos publicado Cartas a Felice.

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Reviews for The Castle

Rating: 3.6666666666666665 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

78 ratings35 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Kafka is interesting, that's for sure. But his style does not work well for me, I find it a chore to read even though I'm intrigued by it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A frustrating reading experience. Finished 3 chapters and thought i'd better leave it alone for now. Will eventually revisit, but for now it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. Of course they aren’t meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error.

    We were all once younger. I don't know if we have all been haunted.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I would like to see where Kafka would have taken this unfinished novel which stops in mid-sentence. His protagonist K. seems so unreflective and tossed about by those around him. Chock full of that patented dark Kafka humor, it lurches from one slightly nightmarish episode to another, and the translation seems to catch the dreamlike prose that this novel is known for. A bit frustrating to read, for Kafka seems to dispense with paragraphs for many pages at a time. It really slowed me down.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was weird, but not as weird, or as difficult, as I was expecting. The narrative flows reasonably well. There are passages that go on interminably, but there's enough action to make them bearable. It felt like reading someone else's crazy dream, with the contradictions and strange passage of time. Poor K. Accepted into the village for all the wrong reasons. I see where The Prisoner TV show got its ideas from now!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The Castle always has the advantage . . .
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I listened to the audio and I found it a lot easier to understand than trying to read it. I liked K's determination which teaches never to give up which is a good lesson. K's pain and agony were almost humorous at times as I would just say to myself, "Why don't you just move on?" As I listened I could feel the frustration of K trying to reach a goal that was so unattainable and it reminded me of some of the frustrations of everyday life. It is a difficult book to understand but I think it has a very profound message that life is an endless round of disappointments that seems to have no point but that is the point.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I'm getting off the Kafka train at the next stop.

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Absolutely brilliant! My first Kafka novel/story ever & I'm dazzled. It's easy to see how the author's last name became a popular adjective (add -esque) in our analytic vernacular. I have no doubt The Castle has the potential to be trying for some, but this narration is one of the best I've ever heard (of ANY audiobook) & completely sucks you in.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I got nothing out of this book. Waste of time
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The first couple of chapters are admittedly a bit of a slog. But once I got into it, I was surprised how much I liked it. You know it’s Kafka so nothing good can happen or progress made, but I was super bummed when it stopped.

    Ppl here are crazy. In every way, this blows The Trial out of the water. There are actual human connections, though they are ambiguous and fragile. The book effectively questions what motivates us, how much are our relationships driven by selfishness, how do we tell our own stories, are rebellion and independence even possible or desirable.

    Nice to see Kafka write women. Surprisingly much less misogynistic than I’d have expected.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is one of the great books of classical literature. The reader is excellent. It’s only unfortunate that it is based on a translation which is distinctly inferior to that of Willa and Edwin Muir.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is not your usual Kafka. Some parts were so wonderfully spare and seemed to hint at something fantastic underneath the surface--relationships with God, between society and hierarchy, and the way that people distance so-called others. The dialogue sections were sooo long, though. There were several chapters that I was nearly certain were completely written in dialogue.

    I know that this was a work-in-progress, clearly evinced from the very last line, before a character is about to speak...and while Kafka was experimental, I don't think he was *that* experimental. That alone makes the whole thing quite interesting. The potential is definitely there, but it is something like sitting down to a dinner, smelling the wonderful dinner-smells to such an extent that you are almost actually able to taste it, and then, discovering that there is no meal, but instead, a lengthy description about what meal you might have had, over the growling of stomachs.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an important classic existentialist novel in the vein of other Kafka's works: absurd, heavy, gloomy, with no exit and at the same time not without a comedic sense to it. As with most of other Kafka's writings it's hard to pin them to one meaning, they are morally ambiguous and open to different interpretations. Who's to argue that Kafka here was not describing life itself?K. is the stranger who appears out of nowhere in sleepy village, a drifter, no one knows his past nor his goals. He is cold and rational and shows an uncanny ability to disarm with his arguments, winning a few hearts and minds in the process. The story, however, really takes off in Chapter 5 and 6, in which K. meets with the village mayor and the landlady, and the ensuing passages contain some brilliantly constructed dialogues. Everything in the village appears to be painfully slow, plain, mundane and yet at the same time deceitful and inexplicably complicated. Trying to reach the inaccessible fabled castle, K. finds himself in an absurd and strange existential drama and rebels.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nog bevreemdender dan Het Proces, maar prachtige sc?nes. Andermaal het individu tegenover de onzichtbare almacht, maar minstens evenzeer over hoe de perceptie van mensen doorslaggevend is. Tegelijk een soort Bildungsroman : als K. aankomt is hij een onbeschreven blad, maar hij probeert hardnekkig dat blad ingevuld te krijgen.Eerste keer gelezen toen ik 17 was.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nog bevreemdender dan Het Proces, maar prachtige scènes. Andermaal het individu tegenover de onzichtbare almacht, maar minstens evenzeer over hoe de perceptie van mensen doorslaggevend is. Tegelijk een soort Bildungsroman : als K. aankomt is hij een onbeschreven blad, maar hij probeert hardnekkig dat blad ingevuld te krijgen.Eerste keer gelezen toen ik 17 was.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Absolutely incomprehensible!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book can be read as an introduction to dystopian literature.Joseph K. (the protagonist) arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle. K. believes that he's been invited to a town to do some land surveying, and realises upon his arrival that his invitation was maybe the result of a bureaucratic mishap. K. wants answers from the officials at the castle that overlooks the town.This book is about bureaucracy, meaning, connection, relationships, and how hierarchy impacts the way we experience and live in this world.It may be an unfinished work, but it is an amazing book that can test your conception of the real purpose in your life.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A land-surveyor simply named K travels to a distant village after being summoned to work there by officials at the mysterious Castle. Upon arrival, he is treated poorly by the majority of the local villagers and is told that a mistake was made when he was offered a job as there is no work for him. However, K does manage to almost immediately become engaged to the barmaid Frieda and make friends with the messenger Barnabas and his family, who are considered outcasts of society because of his sister Amalia's refusal to offer sexual favors to a Castle official. Meanwhile, K fruitlessly pursues Klamm, the Castle official assigned to him, in hopes of finding out more about his situation. Additionally, K tries to manage the annoying antics of the two assistants he meets upon arrival at the village and is given a deal to work as the school's janitor in lieu of the land-surveying he expected. I am going to start this review by openly and only somewhat abashedly noting that the reason I gave this book such a low rating is because I flat out did not understand what was going on the majority of the time. Kafka is known for being surreal and writing in a dream-like logic, but this book crossed a line for me. While I enjoyed both The Metamorphosis and The Trial, The Castle dragged on far too long for me without ever seeming to make a point. My research on the book points to various themes of the book: religion/salvation (which I did not see at all); isolation/alienation (yes, it's there but c'mon already, how many long dialogues do we need to get that K and the Barnabas family don't fit in?); and bureaucratic red tape (which The Trial already covered perfectly). But, as I hinted out above, the book just went on for too long to make me care any longer about trying to suss out what on earth Kafka was talking about anymore. There is no real action in the book and little by the way of "showing" in the narration. Rather, the book is just one long series of monologues with characters going on and on about the Castle and its inhabitants, often contradicting themselves as their speeches droned on interminably. There's only so much a reader can take of yet another character saying something about how K doesn't know how things work in the village and how wonderful the Castle officials are, no matter how unattainable they may be. Some readers have noted that this book is "funny," presumably in a dark humor/satirical way, but sadly I did not find that to be true for the vast majority of the text. Again, the narrative really seemed to drag at times, and I lost a lot of interest by the half-way point, after which I was just ready for it to end. When the book did finally conclude - if you can call a unfinished sentence a conclusion - I was just happy it was over (although that was mixed with annoyance that the end was uncompleted!). I recognize that Kafka was ill and dying when he wrote this book and that he asked that his unfinished manuscripts be destroyed upon his death; therefore this criticism of the novel is somewhat unfair as the author was unable to revise, edit down the superfluous dialogue, fix the strange POV/tense change near the end, etc. Nevertheless, as this book is highly praised as a "must-read" classic, I looked at it through that critical lens and was deeply disappointed. The audio version with the equally praised narrator George Guidall did little to remedy the situation. I found Guidall a dull reader who only added to my attitude of "hurry-up-and-be-done" regarding this book. I'd very much recommend The Metamorphosis, The Trial, or even the short stories to anyone interested in reading Kafka for the first time, but I'd steer people away from this book personally. Just my two cents.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book is like reading a dream. I'm not sure whose dream it is though. The Castle is the story of K who was summoned to a village as Land-Surveyor and his trials and tribulations trying to work through the bureaucracy of the castle's politics. Void of any consistent punctuation (paragraphs go on for pages) I found both K and the villagers to be nonsensical and irrational. This must be the most contrary town ever written about. The situations are inane, but Kafka's style is still engaging where I wanted to find out what crazy direction the story would take next. Had Kafka ever finished this work so it wasn't such a burden to read, it definitely would have earned itself more stars.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
     There was a news article today suggesting that two thirds of people questioned lie about the books they have read to appear more sophisticated, so how do you know I'm telling the truth...



    This was somewhat strange. It's never quite clear what is true and what isn't. Everything is open to interpretation. The main character is an incommer, who views the situation in the village very differently from the locals. There are many rules and customs that make the villagers seem brainwashed in comparison to the incommer. The presence of the castle - the seat of power - is always mysterious and threatening, even sinister.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Castle tells the story of a man known simply as K. who arrives in a village to work as a surveyor at the invitation of the authorities in the town's castle, only to discover that there has been some kind of mix up and no surveyor is needed. It follows his attempts to deal with the castle's bureaucracy to receive justice or at least some kind of work (though he never manages to actually meet any of the major officials, but only communicates with them through a couple of apparently useless messages) and the village's residents, who are used to life under the castle's arbitrary rule and have little sympathy for K.'s troubles.The Castle is probably my least favorite of Kafka's major unfinished works, perhaps in part because it seems to be the most unfinished of them. It is similar to The Trial in some ways, but also different in some interesting respects. While the story in The Trial involved endless, mind-numbing bureaucracy with regard to one particular aspect of life, namely the legal system, in the world of The Castle that bureaucracy is expanded to encompass ALL aspects of life, such that life itself becomes unlivable even if one is not accused of any wrongdoing. So The Castle is rather broader, but thus loses the focus of a work like The Trial (on the issue of guilt, in that case)...and that broadness seems to have fomented Kafka's tendency toward vagueness.The Castle also feels somewhat rambling---there are some amusing or thought-provoking parts, but in general it just doesn't seem to be going anywhere. That's kind of the point, of course, but after a while it just starts to drag. It didn't seem that well-written for Kafka either, but I don't know how much of that is due to Mark Harman's translation of this edition and how much to the rough state of Kafka's original drafts.On the whole, worth reading perhaps once, but some of Kafka's other work is better.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Being very dry and long-winded while being an unfinished book, The Castle was very hard to get through for me. Although it was only 280 pages, it would be much more if it had been edited using standard practices. As this is the first book by Kafka I have read, I am not sure if it his style, or because he didn't finish the book, but paragraph breaks were few and far between, even when there was a change in dialogue speaker.I did enjoy and find rather relatable Kafka's themes of the absurdity of a nontransparent, yet subtly out-of-control bureaucracy; the absurdity of the the status quo; and how people can have such different, yet thoroughly thought-out perspectives, possibly stemming from deeply ingrained biases.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This survived all three editions so far of '1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die'? I don't think it should have. 'The Trial' made my list of favorites the year I read that, so it can't be because I don't like Kafka. A lot of the same elements were in both books, but I guess The Trial was just more polished. The Castle is really an unfinished book, so you have to wonder how much Kafka may have changed it if he could have. And this is one of the books Kafka never wanted to publish. If The Castle was the first Kafka book I read, I don't think I would have tried any others. While reading this, I was jokingly thinking maybe "Kafkaesque" means a nightmarish book that never ends, takes way too long to read and seems pretty pointless, but then the book ends in the middle of a sentence, almost like waking up in the middle of a nightmare. I'd say try The Trial.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A frustrating, irritating book that accurately describes the impersonality of the bureaucracy.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I really wish this book would have been finished. Yes, like many others, I found it pedantic, completely boorish, and futile; however, it also had such hilarious moments that I really enjoyed. Overall, I still want more. It seems to me like we only have about half of the text and that Kafka would have written another 400 pages or so. Like reading a technical manual.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Kafka's writing style is very challenging at points, droning on with long, highly punctuated sentences, and even longer paragraphs... sometimes spanning 10 pages. Somehow... its utterly annoying and totally engaging at the same time, very bizarre.Overall, it's a pity the book was unfinished, cause I was finally starting to get into it. For those who don't know, the book literally ends in mid-sentence.The main character K. speaks for Kafka's obvious hatred for bureaucracy and authority. Toward the end of the book, (who knows where that really is in relation to the story it intended to be) you start learning some interesting facts (purely opinions, because there are no facts in his world) that really shape the book and could change the way you look at the story, but unfortunately it was never expounded on... so one never knows where Kafka could had gone with this.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book was sadly never finished by Kafka before he died in 1924. He began writing it in 1922 and it was first published after his death in 1926. It tells the story of K who is a surveyor. He is summoned to the castle, but when he arrives he is not granted admittance and it seems he was summoned by accident. He stays though and keeps trying to find ways around his exclusion and tries petitioning various people and officials.He meets Freida at one of the bars and after a tumble under one of the tables they end up engaged and living together. They are thrown out of the bar after the landlady falls out with K who generally seems to misunderstand and rub everyone up the wrong way. They end up living in a school room which is less than ideal with K's two unwanted assistants who keep getting him in more and more trouble!It's a strange novel and I never quite understood why K didn't just leave. There seemed no point in staying and I am sure he said he had a family (which I assumed meant wife) at the start. I liked the Barnabas character and his two sisters who unforatunely didn't get on with Freida at all. It's a shame it was never finished, it ends in the middle of a sentence in fact. I would love to have seen how it all played out and what became of K.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I love the trial, and many of Kafka's short stories but the castle lacks something somehow. Maybe it's the way the oppressive, intense rush of a confusing modern world that Kafka captures so well elsewhere can hardly hope to be translated into the medievalesque setting of this novel. It comes across as rather twee and annoying.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is why they coined the term Kafkaesque. Can you get to the castle? You must, but there is no way. But you know you have to go, but there is no way to go. The concept is interesting, he just did not need a whole novel to work it out.