O Castelo

✍️ Franz Kafka

The Castle is Vintage Kafka. It is the ultimate ‘kafkaesque’ novel.

The book begins with the arrival of K, the new land surveyor to a small village around a castle. In the opening chapters, we are presented to the Castle, an unattainable entity consisting of layers and layers of elusive employees (to the point that most of them are known by name but were never seen by the village peasants). By the middle of the book, the dialogues got so surreal sometimes that it made me laugh at the all the absurdity and bureaucracy.

In the end, I was not sure if K was indeed a land surveyor. It seems that Kafka transformed this book into “the castle” for the reader. Layers and layers of elusive and strange characters/storylines/dialogues. Like K that never reached the castle, we never reach the end of the story (since the book ends mid-sentence).