Little of Kafka's writing was published in his lifetime and he was hardly known outside a small circle of friends, one of whom, Max Brod, was largely responsible for preserving and publishing the manuscripts that Kafka left when he died from tuberculosis at the age of only 41. The Trial first appeared in German the year after its author's death. Joseph K., the central character in Kafka's nightmarish narrative, awakes one morning to find that he is under arrest. No one will tell him the crimes of which he is accused and never, in the course of the interrogation to which he is subjected, is it explained. Events move relentlessly towards a seemingly inevitable and violent conclusion. Kafka is one of tose novelists who has had an adjective coined from his name and the description 'Kafkaesque' is regularly given to any fiction in which characters struggle against faceless bureaucracy and an apparently malign fate. Just as Byron was more than just Byronic and Dickens wrote novels which were not simply Dickensian, Kafka was a much more wide-ranging writer than the usually accepted meaning of Kafkaesque suggests. His work, particularly his short stories, contain far more than just gloomy alienation and paranoia. There is a grotesque comedy in many of the stories, from 'Metamorphosis', with its famous account of a man struggling to deal with the fact that he has been transformed overnight into a gigantic beetle, to 'In the Penal Colony', where a prison officer is so impressed by a new device for torture and execution that he eventually uses it on himself. The novels, particularly The Trial, may seem open to interpretation as dark political allegories, predictive of the fascist horrors that were soon to engulf much of Europe, but they can also be read as daring exercises in the blackest of black humor.

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