it shouldn't come as any surprise to me that the word “Kafkaesque” is not remotely descriptive of Kafka’s actual work, at least in common usage. the intended evocation is of an individual brutally disoriented within a Byzantine bureaucracy. in The Castle, K. is actually an equal actor in the nonsense. the world of the Castle and its functionaries may be new to him but he approaches it with an arrogance that makes his continual punishment seem to be the just deserts of an entitled tourist rather than the cruel outcome of implacable administrative authority. maybe the biggest misconception about Kafka's work is that it is possible to identify with it in an emotional, human way, when really it is a closed system which only the reader can find truly inscrutable.

Kafka's bleak imagination produced a world where no one lives a civilian life and everyone is a bureaucrat 24 hours a day. the stakes are impossibly petty and simultaneously totally overwhelming. the idea that K. might ever physically reach the Castle quickly evaporates. i naively thought that the lord of the Castle, Count Westwest, might be an important character at some point but he is mentioned by name exactly once; instead, all of the drama is based on K.’s scrabbling to establish meaningful contact with minor secretaries, or their secretaries, or their secretaries’ stewards, or their secretaries’ stewards’ servants, or… and the connections that K. does make are infinitely complicated and also completely unimportant. except for a few absurd sequences the novel is massive blocks of dialogue covering the most minute politicking imaginable. Kafka's style is perfectly attuned to his subject matter in that it is hideous and humorless. there is a magnetic quality that, against all odds, pulls the reader along well past the point when it becomes clear that nothing significant will develop. that The Castle breaks off mid-sentence is the only satisfying ending possible, I think. it is otherwise unendable.

Kafka's world and writing are bizarre and singular but that doesn't mean I can stand them. there is only room for one monumental, nightmarish, intentionally boring work of art in my heart and it already belongs to another (Twin Peaks: The Return). I'm glad I read this for cultural reasons and bafflingly I do think it will stick with me but all of the praise directed at it seems to entirely miss the point, which is precisely that it is expertly written to be the kind of thing no one should want to read. for a novel about a massive castle bureaucracy I much prefer the mystical Titus Groan.