Josef K. wakes up arrested for a crime nobody will name, and that’s the entire premise, and somehow it sustains itself for a whole novel without ever once telling you what he actually did. I went in expecting the frustration everyone warns you about and got it anyway, this is a genuinely difficult, deliberately confusing book, and I don’t think that’s a flaw so much as the entire point being enacted on the reader instead of just described to them.

The parable in the cathedral chapter, “Before the Law,” a man spends his entire life waiting at a door meant specifically for him, asking permission to enter, never entering, is the part of this book I keep returning to independent of the rest of the plot. It’s been anthologized on its own for a reason. K.’s reaction to hearing it, arguing with the priest about what it means, is the closest the book comes to explaining its own method without breaking the spell.

Translation matters enormously here, more than with most novels I’ve read, and I’d tell anyone picking this up for the first time to actually research which translation they’re getting before committing, since apparently the German has ambiguities that different translators resolve in genuinely different directions. I read the Breon Mitchell translation and found it readable in a way I’d heard older translations weren’t.

It’s unfinished, Kafka never completed it and it was published against his own wishes after his death, and you can feel the incompleteness in a few chapters that seem to trail rather than end. That said, the term “Kafkaesque” earning its own dictionary entry off the back of this book alone tells you something about how completely it captured a specific, still-recognizable kind of dread. Four stars, difficult, worth every bit of the difficulty.