Am I missing something? So far this is complete horseshit. The prose is bland and clumsy...

This, Kafka's prose reflects the almost robotic overanalyziation of his characters. Kafka's world are worlds of paranoia projected outwards, where everyone is calculating every move, where the slightest of social interactions are unspoken Machiavellian power struggles.

No. Youre not.

The average retarded American that also loves Oprah, and The View consider this book to be 'so deep, wow, so classical'

It is nothing in comparison of the works that men like you and I should be reading.

I liked the idea of The Trial much more than the actual reading. The ending itself I loved, but everything the middle just seems kinda... muddy.

isn't that the whole idea behind it?

I guess, but it seems like that in the sense of feeling like there's no real point in reading it rather than not knowing what's going on behind the scenes.

nice doggo but poorly articulated opinion

I don't know, perhaps you've got a point. I'm in the process of reading it (haven't gone halfway through yet) but I have read some of his other works and the way I see his writing is that he mocks certain societal behaviors and moral codes that we choose to stick to. For example, in Metamorphosis he is satirizing the rigidity of the family's structure and how social stigma is more important to them than the life of one of their own, how instantly the minute Gregor is unable to provide for them, his family is ready to mistreat him and dispose of him, regardless of the sacrifices he's made for them in the past. What I find Kafka to be exceptional at, is expressing these sentiments and making the reader live through the emotions that the protagonist is going through and really make you experience the stuff that's going on in said novel.

With that said, going into the Trial I'd only expect endless confusion, unknowingness of what's going on along with an inability to resolve a certain situation, and tedious, rigid bureaucratic systems where purpose is lacking, and officials exhibiting zero empathy towards the people they're serving.

But then again I haven't finished it, so I could be talking nonsense

The whole
>reading translations
thing is mostly a meme, but you can't really shit on an author's prose when reading a translation. I don't read German, but I have a friend who is fluent and we spent hours going through works of Kafka's together with him breaking the text down word for word, which gave me some insight into his syntax, diction, etc. From that it seemed to me that Kafka's prose is remarkable. It's been several years since then, and I'm currently drunk, so I'd be hard-pressed to elaborate too much. All I can specifically recall at the moment is that his syntax in particular added much to my understanding of and emotional response to the literature. The way he crafts his sentences leaves emotionally-charged words and phrases until the end of complex sentences, adding a layer to my appreciation for Kafka as a writer.

Amerika was dogshit, senpai

>this thread

Pls dont lie

>he just thinks it's funny that bad things keep happening to this guy.
It's basically a self insert, what are you on about?

The prose is a pleasure in German, I can't speak for the translation. I wouldn't be surprised if it sounds awkward and clumsy as it is very controlled, structured German and not some delicate romantic prose.

>bucketrider.org/why/bucketrider.html
It's even better in German, but I didn't think Kübelreiter wasn't one of his best though.

The fragmentary nature creates an overarching effect that is extremely effective. Same goes for Urfaust/Faust. Der Ring's total lack of subtlety, depth and information, combined with its ambiguity and boldness also creates something very special (though if the music didn't complement it it would be pretty shit).

None of what I said is a lie.

Frank Zappa ils kind of cool desu

Frank Zappa is kind of cool desu

There's probably no translation that could replicate Kafka's construction of sentences without sounding really strange. He wrote run on sentences that would last several pages. The closest comparison I can think of right now would be Beckett's The Unnamable.

An obvious example of the weird sentence structure would be the first sentence of Metamorphosis. In the original German it ends on the word "transformed". It sort of suddenly and shockingly gives the rest of the sentence its final meaning.

It would read something like:
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself, into a gigantic vermin, had transformed."

So if what makes a book good gets lost in translation, what's the point of reading it?

For the 85% of the novel that does carry over. Just as it's nonsense that a translation is a one for one recreation of a text, it's also just as naive to believe the only literary device a novel has is its original word order.

>He wrote run on sentences that would last several pages. The closest comparison I can think of right now would be Beckett's The Unnamable.

Joseph Heller also does this in Something Happened. It's been awhile since I read it, but I remember single sentences and even single parentheticals extending past a full page. It's also an amazing book, easily his best novel, far more sophisticated than Catch-22 although it contains similar humor and toying with language. Satire on the emptiness of average, middle-class life. Sort of The Great Gatsby meets Office Space (although it's much better than Gatsby, too).

Yeah, you're missing out. The Trial is so good that it's a work of art in its own right.

The Metamorphosis is also really good. Kafka is a genius.

The dude was writing with tuberculosis, would constantly laugh uncontrollably while describing his own work, and fervently hated the idea of his work being translated—he wanted his work burned for a reason: He was incapable of writing what he meant to say.

His lunatic ramblings that somehow adhere to the plot, however, are why his work has charm. His ideas are brilliant, and his prose is fascinating, but its not good by any measure. It is, however, very vague open to many interpretations; reading him will give you visions that other books could only dream of giving. Therein lies the beauty of Kafka, just don't mistake his stories as brilliant or intentional—they are the avatars of the thoughts and emotions of a perplexed person.

kafka's funny man, like this guy is wandering around all these wierd rooms trying to figure out what hes been charged with, and theres all these women who really want to fuck him.