Awful End.

1-Oh my god, what happened to you?
2-"He wants to know if it hurts!"
1-Oh, what a brilliant introduction, Gogo. Is that the best you can come up with?
2-Fuck you, I'm in serious pain!
1-You still haven't answered my question.
2-I'm dying.
1-I see.
2-What a brilliant reply.
1-I do my best.
2-Well, what do I do now?
1-Who are you waiting for?
2-Death, I guess.
1-That's a shame.
2-'Bout as much as anything.
1-Anything I can do for you?
2-Go away.
1-Is that all? I leave and you die?
2-I just want to lie here and sleep for a bit.
1-Then that's the end of it?
2-I suppose so.
1-I suppose that's what you wanted, then, you'll die some tragic hero until the moment you're gone and then you'll be forgotten, for them to call out your name.
2-Beautiful.
1-I don't think they even know you're gone yet.
2-Then so be it.
1-Goodbye.
2-Good night.

I like to think that Franz Kafka's The Trial was essentially the best book ever.

Normally I would like to have some sort of introduction to a claim like that, something to ponder over for some time before I truly explain. This is because I have a natural dislike for the forthright and simple. It's not entertaining, it is not art, to simply say what I mean. I am not even comfortable to say that much without continuing on for some time. I actually considered this matter for some time, and came to all sorts of conclusions, that it may be a family trait, or it may be my tendency to attempt to somewhat disguise or muddle my message (Eisenhower was said to do the same thing), but then I remembered what I was talking about, I am extremely forgetful, though that's only part of the matter, though related, I was talking about Franz Kafka.

I believe I started reading Kafka last year, with a collection of short stories, including his best-known work, The Metamorphosis, about a man who transforms into a monstrous vermin, and of course, one of his defining features is his excessively long sentences. If we take a very common translation of the first sentence of The Metamorphosis: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin."
That is simply too much. Not for me, but for most people. The sentence is very elegant (although I am led to believe that it is better in German; the translation retains much of his German elegance though loses most of his wordplay). No poetry expresses as much colour or imagery as the Long Sentence. It's this technique that I've picked up, out of respect for such a great writer, and in the hopes that it will make me a similarly great writer, not to imitate his style, but rather to assimilate it, and develop my own, and continue to improve my writing (which is still far from perfect or even consistent in style).

But I am not talking about The Metamorphosis. I am talking about The Trial. The plot is relatively simple; our rather absurd hero, Josef K., wakes up one morning to find that he has been arrested by two random men, though he is not allowed to know why, and he is allowed to go about his daily business. He is forced to visit the courts regularly, and he continues to struggle against the law, and he continues to do so up until the point when he is executed by two random
men by being stabbed in the stomach with a knife (these are not the same men as the beginning).

What does any of that mean, though? There are several interpretations of Kafka's work, and Sartre went so far as to suggest that it is an allegory for the persecution of the Jews, and I will go only as far as to suggest that this is ridiculous, particularly since Kafka hardly associated with the Jews, and it is his alienation from Judaism, as he was from every part of his life, that is one of the most important parts of Kafka's work. In K.'s plight, he goes to find many people, an artist, a lawyer, another defendant, and many women who are attracted to his guilt, only to find that no one is interested in him beyond what they can do to further themselves. His lawyer is particularly frustrating; he refuses to take any sort of interest in K., however K. cannot refuse his help because Huld, the lawyer, is a family friend (and thus Kafka introduces his own alienation from his family).

One particularly startling aspect of Kafka's work is that it was his view of the world, and as such it is eerily similar and often nightmarish, like a dream one cannot wake from. K.'s attempts to defeat the dense and innavigable bureaucracy are often humourous, but also remniscent of real world legal issues and quite terrifying at points. Kafka's aspect is that it is almost our world, but it is not; it is only strange and surreal, not impossible. Kafka uses this method to describe a vivid world, one that seems real.

A lot of people have asked me why this makes a book so great. It's actually quite simple, though, I simply can't help but respect a man who captured the trials and absurdity of modern existence with such a sublime method.