Afterward, Josef meets his angry uncle outside, who claims that Josef's lack of respect for the process has hurt his case.ĭuring subsequent visits to Huld, Josef realizes that he is a capricious character who will not be much help to him. During the conversation, Leni calls Josef away and takes him to the next room for a sexual encounter. to Herr Huld, a sickly and bedridden lawyer tended to by Leni, a young nurse who shows an immediate attraction to Josef.
Worried by the rumors about his nephew, the uncle introduces K. Josef is visited by his uncle, a traveling countryman. The next day he returns to the storage room and is shocked to find everything as he had found it the day before, including the whipper and the two agents. tries to argue with the flogger, saying that the men need not be whipped, but the flogger cannot be swayed. for bribes and as a result of complaints K. One evening, in a storage room at his own bank, Josef discovers the two agents who arrested him being whipped by a flogger for asking K. becomes extremely weak in the presence of other court officials and accused. on a tour of the court offices, which ends after K. The woman gives him information about the process and attempts to seduce him before a law student bursts into the room and takes the woman away, claiming her to be his mistress.
Josef later tries to confront the presiding judge over his case, but only finds an attendant's wife.
Josef is severely reproached for his tardiness, and he arouses the assembly's hostility after a passionate plea about the absurdity of the trial and the emptiness of the accusation. After a period of exploration, Josef finds the court in the attic. Josef is ordered to appear at the court's address the coming Sunday, without being told the exact time or room. He suspects that this manoeuver is meant to distance him from Bürstner. Josef visits Bürstner to vent his worries, and then kisses her.Ī few days later, Josef finds that Fräulein Montag, a lodger from another room, has moved in with Fräulein Bürstner. Josef's landlady, Frau Grubach, tries to console Josef about the trial, but insinuates that the procedure may be related to an immoral relationship with his neighbor Fräulein Bürstner. Josef is not imprisoned, however, but left "free" and told to await instructions from the Committee of Affairs. On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K., the chief cashier of a bank, is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for an unspecified crime. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde 's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter which appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending.Īfter Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. One of his best known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”īrilliantly imagined, with superb supporting performances from Ken Stott, Elaine Collins and Phyllis Logan, this is a perfectly enjoyable winter treat.The Trial (German: Der Process, later Der Proceß, Der Prozeß and Der Prozess) is a novel written by Franz Kafka between 19 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. Grant) suffering a frustrating bout of writer’s block, as he works on the opening line to his story Metamorphosis:
(Or, in the words of Elvis Presley, the series needs “A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action.”) Capaldi certainly has the pedigree to deliver this, as he is already an Oscar-winning film director and writer, who picked up an Academy Award for his fabulous short Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life in 1995.Ĭapaldi’s film features Franz Kafka (wonderfully played by Richard E. Capaldi brings the tired series back to some quality story-lines, and less of the puerile, narcissistic, self-referential navel-gazing of recent years. So, Peter Capaldi has finally arrived as the new Doctor Who, making a promising (though fleeting) appearance at the end of a rather indulgent (and dire) Christmas Doctor Who special.