Julian Meynell's Books

Kafka's works all read like parables, but what if anything they are parables of is obscure. The typical Kafka tropes are here. The dreamlike matter-of-factness of the surreal, the arcane bureaucracy, the continual circling of a goal that never comes any closer and whose purpose is obscure. There is also a lot on the interrelationship s between men and women. There is the continual sense of dislocation and of people failing to communicate. The novel is unfinished and breaks off in mid-sentence. For whatever reason the lack of an ending has always suited Kafka, and I think that if he could have provided endings, they would have cheapened the circling fruitlessness of what had gone before.

I get the sense that Kafka is falling out of fashion, but if anything his work grows ever more relevant. This isn't Kafka at his finest (that's the short stories) but it is well worth reading.