The last work of Franz Kafka in new Vietnamese translation, presented by Tran Ngoc Hieu & Tran Kieu Van.
„It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep snow. There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest gleam of light suggested the large Castle.” The fog of the mysterious prelude lays like a veil over the further incidents in the last work of Franz Kafka “The Castle”:
Land surveyor K. follows the alleged invitation to the lord of a castle into the adjacent village. However, all attempts fail to contact the castle’s administration. The more K. tries to fight against the enormous, intransparent power of the bureaucratic machinery, the more he veers away from his actual plan. The search for K.’s place in the village develops into a network of secrets and abasement. K. feels increasingly helpless in the face of the threatening hierarchy, which seems to control everything and remains enigmatic. Will the protagonist give up and finally submit himself to the authority of the castle like the other villagers do?
The German-speaking writer Franz Kafka was born 1883 in Prague. “The Castle” forms besides “The Trial” and “Amerika: The Missing Person” one of his main works that shaped the term “kafkaesk” to describe an expressionistic and surrealistic style of literature. The fragment “The Castle” written in 1922 couldn’t be finished due to Kafka’s state of health. Kafka’s works have mainly been published after his death and against his own order by his friend and testamentary executor Max Brod.
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