The Castle (J. A. Underwood 1997 Translation)

✍ Scribed by Franz Kafka

• Publisher: Penguin, Random House
• Year: 1922
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 238 KB
• Edition: Penguin Classics (2015)
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0141904151

✦ Synopsis

{ Oct 2020 - Verified ebook }
Paperback, 280 pages
Published 1922
Penguin Classics (2015)
TheGreatestBooks.org Top 500 Ever |
Translated by: J. A. Underwood (1997)
Introduction by: Idris Parry (1997)
Das Schloss first published in Germany 1926
The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.'s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. Kafka began The Castle in 1922 and it was never finished, yet this, the last of his three great novels, draws fascinating conclusions that make it feel strangely complete.

Kafka never finished this book. In fact, it breaks off in the middle of a sentence. He did not finish any of his three novels; they and many of his stories remained unpublished during his lifetime. Dying of tuberculosis in 1924, he asked his writer friend Max Brod to burn his papers. Brod did not do so (nor, surely, can Kafka seriously have expected him to) but instead edited much of Kafka’s work after his death and published it bit by bit.
In this, Max Brod’s contribution was immense; without Brod, Franz Kafka might be a minor name, known only to a few specialists. In other respects, however, scholars wishing to uncover Kafka’s original intentions have had to undo a lot of what Brod did, patiently stripping away the textual adjustments and layers of interpretation that, with the best of intentions, he and those who followed him had imposed on the dead man’s prose (and that, for example, inevitably affected the way in which Kafka’s first English translators, Willa and Edwin Muir, approached their task).
The original on which this translation is based is, as nearly as we can tell, The Castle as Kafka left it; I hope the translation will give English readers a glimpse of the original’s freshness. -- J. A. Underwood