The Trial - Franz Kafka

Category: Adults, General Fiction, Literature
Language: English
Keywords: Authoritarianism Bureaucracy False Arrest

Written by Franz Kafka
Read by Geoffrey Howard
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 48 Kbps
Unabridged

Translated by Breon Mitchell
Release date: 08-18-08
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher’s Summary
Josef K. is an employee at a bank, an Everyman without any particular qualities or ambitions. His inconsequence makes doubly strange his “arrest” by an officer of the court, made with no formal charges or explanation.
Disoriented and consumed with guilt for a “crime” he does not understand, Josef K. must justify his life to a “court” with which he cannot communicate. The defendant can only ask questions, but receives no answers to clarify the surreal world in which he is compelled to wander.

Through the court’s relentless bureaucratic proceedings and absurd juxtapositions of different hypotheses of cause and effect, the whole rational structure of the world is undermined. The trial of Josef K. becomes a chilling existential metaphor for life itself, where every sentence is a sentence of death.

©1998 Schocken Books, Inc. (P)1998 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Critic Reviews

“Howard’s British accent and deep monotone set the proper dark tone for the book….Howard acts as our intellectual guide by emphasizing key passages and marking them as worthy of interpretation and discussion.” ( AudioFile)