This is a difficult book to review, as there is so much to say that I can't seem to find the words for. I might as well start by saying that had this book been completed, I would've felt more comfortable giving it a 5 star rating; I give it a 4.5. I find it ludicrous to try and mark down a book by Kafka by the decimal though, and feel his name alone should carry enough weight.
This was a fantastic book. I couldn't stop reading it and arguably I should have, given my current work load. Despite having seen Orson Welles self-proclaimed masterpiece beforehand, I found this book more as another clue to the story's mystery, rather than as a brilliant work subjected to an inevitable film adaption.
Yes: this book is slow. Yes: this book is written in an archaic style. Deal with it.
If you were to write a book concerning the tedious and absurd struggles through a labyrinthine system that works its way like a river beneath a city unknowingly built upon it, would you write it so it was fun and easy? Regardless of your opinion, Kafka wrote it that way, and in doing so has created an insight into his own "dreamlike inner life", to quote an excerpt of his diary.
It's hard to pin down just what it is that makes this book so powerful, as in reading it one might feel a constant sense of just being on the verge of "figuring it out" before closing the book on your finger to stare up to the ceiling hoping to catch a glimpse of a fading idea; a forlorn hope that someday the struggle will end. In the way that old black and white films are often of that slight sepia tone, this book carries with it that sense of tinted reality, as though our own perceptions of right and wrong are just perceptions of that which, simply, just is.
Who knows, perhaps the mystery of this text will never solved. In all honesty I don't see how it ever CAN be solved. It is a book that concerns more than a simple man being brought forth before the law, yet at the same time, that's all there really is to it? Do we not all face a trial at some point in our life? Are we not all "innocent"? Perhaps we shall only find out when our own doors before the Law are closed.
