As I have said before (at point 4 here and again here), I am a fan of book reviews that give you an idea of what it is like to read the book. So, to practise what I preach, here goes. (More below the break.)
The Trial is reasonably short. It is unfinished, but that should not put you off: it is not unfinished in the sense of lacking an ending - it has the only ending that one feels it could have - but rather we find that the odd chapter doesn't quite conclude and, as the introduction to my translation points out, the "wandering, inconclusive interviews between Josef K. and his mentors could have been extended and elaborated almost indefinitely", a blunt but accurate comment that tells you much about the book.
There is not much to say about the plot. As we all know, the book starts by telling us that someone must have been telling lies about Josef K. because one morning he was arrested, although he had done nothing wrong; and then the rest of the book describes his subjection to an incomprehensible and obscure legal process through which he is assisted - or perhaps hindered - by a ragbag collection of "mentors".
The interesting aspect of the story is that Josef K. is not in custody while this trial is going on, as I had naively assumed would be the case. The original title is "Process" or "Prozess", i.e. the German word that we might translate as "legal proceedings" (but of course the word "trial" in English also has connotations of "hardship" which make it an appropriate translation). That means that he has to try to continue with his day to day life, doing things like working in a bank and meeting clients, while the proceedings rumble on oppressively. The result is that the book contains a lot of episodes in which something resembling everyday life is presented, but that everyday life is contorted by the weight of the trial into dream-like forms.
Much to my surprise, reading The Trial turned out to be rather like reading Kazuo Ishiguro at his most characteristic (or perhaps his most self-indulgent), but with most of the story taken out. In fact, the experience of reading The Trial is really quite similar to my memory of what it was like to read The Unconsoled, one of Ishiguro's less popular works. (In a kind of homage to Herr K. - and also to save typing - I will henceforth refer to both books by their initials.)
One theme that Kafka and Ishiguro both explore is the potentially overwhelming power that social niceties and social obligations have to entangle someone in inescapable undignified situations. Let me give you a couple of examples. First, here is Josef K. with a client who recommends that he gets in touch with a painter who might be able to help with his case.
K. will of course have to see the painter. When he does so, the painter tells him a mass of confusing things (as is the wont of poor old K.'s mentors) and then the time comes for K. to leave. The painter lives in a cramped garret and he explains that the best way out is by stepping across his bed.
K. is often subjected to indignities of this kind. He is forced to crawl across someone's bed or buy pictures he doesn't want, or to become very hot or rather uncomfortable, and at one point he waits for a client who doesn't show up. He is not subjected to 1984-esque outright unpleasantness (if you want to place The T in relation to other famous twentieth century works about the oppressive state). The force that is subjecting him to these indignities is something recognisably akin to the obligations created by normal social interactions.
This kind of topic can be the source of comedy - and apparently Kafka sometimes used to laugh when reading his work out loud - but the cumulative effect of the The T is not comic. It is not comic even in the way that Metamorphosis is comic. It is simply oppressive.
Here's a bit from The U for comparison with that passage from The T.
Our protagonist, Mr Ryder, goes downstairs and meets Mr Hoffman.
Another similarity of the two books is in what I might call their fantastic topography. In The T, the court seems to have chambers everywhere: for example, when K. finally clambers over the painter's bed and through the door we left him at in the quotation above, he finds himself (yet again) in another set of court chambers. Similarly in The U, Ryder's travels can take him across town, and yet he ends up in another part of the hotel in which he is staying. The physical geography of the place replicates and reinforces the interior constraints of the protagonists.
There are some notable differences between the books. As the excerpts above show, Ishiguro lays on the emotional obligation rather more thickly than Kafka. I think that is inherent in the structure of the two books: in The T, K. is always under some form of compulsion from the trial process, while, in The U, Mr Ryder is a concert pianist who is visiting to give a performance, so the constraints under which he labours are by necessity more ones of social, emotional or professional obligation than K.'s bureaucratic or legal ones.
In some ways reading The U is a 'purer' experience of this kind of thing than reading The T. They are both about protagonists who try to navigate a world that is reminiscent of ours, but one which they cannot control and which works on something more like dream logic, but one feels that Kafka is making (or at least alluding to) a point about the inhumanity of bureaucratic processes, or the alienation of modern man from the systems in which he lives and which govern him (while making some weird points about women too), whereas Ishiguro is just giving us that world and playing around in it.
The T is perhaps more same-y than The U: K. meets mentor, mentor spouts nonsense at length while K. suffers awkward indignity or discomfort, K. ends up no further forward; while in The U a greater variety of different things happen, or fail to happen, to Ryder.
The overall effect of the two books, however, is similar: indeed, even the place that Ryder is visiting is a vaguely described central European city, quite possibly the very same city that K. lived in a couple of generations earlier.
I hope that all of the discussion and quotation above has discharged my self-imposed obligation to tell you what it is like to read The Trial. There is of course more going on in The T than I have said - I have not spoiled it for you - but I have tried to convey the experience of reading it to you so that you can see if you would like to give it a go. If you recognise the elements of Ishiguro that I refer to and would like to see them taken to their extreme then this could be the book for you.
But I feel that I should go on to tell you whether I think The T is any good. I will do so but, I'm afraid, in a rather roundabout way.
The devices used in The T and The U to create a protagonist who is constrained by the rules of a world she or he does not fully understand, but who is sufficiently socially or emotionally aware to feel the import of those rules, are frequently used by Ishiguro. In Ishiguro's most successful works (and I use the word "successful" in all its senses), such as The Remains of the Day or Klara and the Sun, those devices are used to generate pathos because we, the readers, are better able than the protagonist to see what is really going on and what the rules of the world really are. But in The T and The U, the devices are taken one stage further: neither we nor the protagonist are given a proper insight into the rules of the world.
That further step, the elevation of a narrative device to a meta-fictional level, reduces the pathos of the situation (to my mind at least). In order for books of this kind - one might think also of Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe in this context, although that does something a little different - to generate some emotional engagement, or at least interest, in a reader, it is necessary for the book to give us something to recognise or latch on to within the world of the story. To that end, the books hint at the rules that govern their worlds, giving us glimpses of how it might work, and they also give the imagined world sufficient familiarity with the real world to trigger associations, preferably emotion-laden associations, in the mind of the reader.
I have used the word "dream" a couple of times above because the technique, if it comes off, is similar to the way dreams work: dreams are gripping as they are happening, and always appear suggestive of meaning and order, but they do not ultimately adhere to the rules of the waking world or perhaps any rules at all. A good dream also has the quality of making one think that it must mean something and leave one trying to work out what it meant.
Both The T and The U pull off the trick, in my view. The problem for me is that I first saw the trick pulled off when I read The U and I enjoyed it then but, when seeing the trick the second time, I was a little too aware of it as a trick. In a way, I could see how the trick was done: a bit of contradiction here, a bit of combining real things and nonsense there, a bit of vague but allusive description on top ... As a result, I was not really inclined to suspend my disbelief enough to caught by the trick. The fault may be entirely my own but, once I had seen what was happening in The T, once I realised that the nature of the charge will never be known, that there would never actually be a trial, that the procedures determining K.'s future were essentially arbitrary and unknowable, then I got a rather so-what? feeling about him and his fate.
Moreover, although I said above that one suspects that Kafka was making a point about the structure of industrialised and bureaucratised modern Western life, quite what the point is passed me by. That it's hard to understand how the modern world works, even when the people who seem to understand it try to explain it to us? That the events that occur to a human living in a developed society are purely arbitrary, so distant are their causes and explanations from his or her ability to grasp or affect them? Maybe. But maybe not. (Or perhaps it is just a laboured satire on legal proceedings that the lawyer in me fails to recognise, but I doubt it.) The upshot is that I was left with a so what? feeling not only about the character and his predicament, but about the import or message of the book as a whole.
To put it another way, while I wouldn't have minded the trick employed in The T being used to tell a story - e.g., to do the Ishiguro thing of gradually letting us, or even the protagonist, realise what is going on - or to make a point about philosophy or society, I didn't quite have the patience to observe it as mere trick.
The T is a classic of Western literature and therefore of course it's good. It would be a really good book for a thoughtful youngish person, perhaps in his (probably his) late adolescence, who has read a few books and who would be blown away by reading The T, The U or, as I think happened to Peter Thiel, The Tartar Steppe, and then by wondering what it all means: I mean (cue hippy voice) woah, man, it's deep and I just want to know what it really means. But if you are in the position of recommending a book of that kind, I would go with The Tartar Steppe or Metamorphosis over The T or The U.
The U received a decidedly mixed reception on publication. I would guess that if the publication dates of The U and The T had been swapped then The U would have been regarded as a classic and The T as a odd thing for a successful writer to produce. (Wikipedia tells me that The U "has come to be generally regarded as one of Ishiguro’s best works" but I'm not sure that's right: the only person I have ever known to recommend the book is me.)
The fundamental point here, I think, is that The T is a really good book for a culture that has not seen something like it before. Unfortunately for us, we have seen it before - and that, I feel, is what sank The U. Whether or not we have individually read The Trial, we have collectively, as a literate society, so thoroughly seen and digested this kind of thing that we now have the very useful word "Kafka-esque". Well done to Kafka for inventing the Kafka-esque! Very clever, good stuff, deserves the plaudits etc etc. But, now that Kafka has done the hard work of inventing it, what next? Let me put it this way: perhaps reading Kafka to learn about the Kafka-esque is like reading Darwin to learn about Darwinism.
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