Latest news with #TheMetamorphosis
Forbes
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Want To Be A Great Leader? Here's What You Should Read
What you choose to read this summer matters more than you may realize. getty A private equity professional recently told me that Franz Kafka's century old short story Poseidon should be required reading for anyone who hopes to lead. In Kafka's telling, the god of the sea isn't commanding waves or stirring storms, he's drowning in paperwork and unable to do the work he was born to do. The executive saw himself in this ancient deity more profoundly than any management case study. His reaction points to something deeper that most leaders miss: overwhelm isn't a sign of importance. Sometimes it's a sign of misalignment between what leadership demands and what leadership is . Unlike management theory, fiction shows us our blind spots, rationalizations, the gap between our intentions and our impact. Sadly, we've created a false binary between "serious" reading and "pleasure" reading. Many leaders pride themselves on reading about strategy and innovation while intentionally shunning literature that highlights the human dynamics that make or break every strategic initiative. A biography of your favorite leader may inspire you or a new business book may feel instructive, but a fictional story with an ethical dilemma will help you see yourself and better understand your teams. The science may surprise you: people who read fiction consistently score higher on cognitive measures—including general intelligence—than those who stick to non-fiction. Fiction uniquely trains your brain to understand the thoughts, feelings and motivations of others. In other words, it builds the muscle that every great leader needs most: empathy. If you manage people, reading fiction might be the most overlooked tool in your arsenal. Here are three ways it can sharpen your judgement, deepen your insight, and help you lead with greater clarity and connection. Your summer reading choices don't just signal your values, they literally reshape your brain: strengthening the neural pathways that make you better at navigating the unspoken dynamics in your next board meeting. When we read about characters—their thoughts, emotions and motivations— we activate the same neural pathways we rely on to understand people. The brain's default network—the system that supports our capacity to imagine and simulate hypothetical circumstances—treats fictional scenarios as practice runs for real life. Consider Kafka's perplexing novella, The Metamorphosis . Traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes one morning to find that he has been transformed into a hideous bug. Unable to work, he struggles to reframe his sense of belonging. Unable to speak, Gregor finds himself and his relationships in deep crisis. Through his story, Kafka forces us to consider how much we define our humanity by the work we do, the company we keep and the existential disorientation of a rapid and unexpected change of circumstance. Written in 1915, this haunting tale foreshadows the modern crisis of identity fueled by mass layoffs, burnout and the looming fear of being replaced by machines. The Metamorphosis instructs leaders in the delicate balance of purpose, identity and motivation, and how easily that balance can be derailed. The executive who reads literature becomes more adept at perspective-taking and navigating interpersonal complexity. As one manufacturing CEO remarked about his own conversion to literature: 'When you can step into the shoes of a character which is like stepping into the shoes of someone else on your team, you recognize that how they're experiencing the world is very different from how you are experiencing the world.' Fiction provides a low-risk laboratory to explore the gray areas of power, delegation, and moral ambiguity. Its characters present clashing motives and complex choices, creating a dynamic space to explore right and wrong and the murky territory in between. Consider Charles Johnson's allegory ' Menagerie: A Child's Fable ,' an affecting story about a pet store whose owner goes missing, leaving the caged animals to fend for themselves. The watchdog, Berkeley, holds the keys to open the cages. Monkey, with questionable intentions but functioning hands, is the only one who can. Animals take charge and the situation devolves, ending in death and destruction. The story refuses to offer easy answers. When Berkeley fails to maintain order and Monkey exploits the chaos, we're forced to confront uncomfortable questions about authority, trust, and unintended consequences, the very dynamics that derail organizations. For the leadership team of an appliance manufacturer, the cages in the story became a metaphor for the silos they had built—and maintained—within their organization. The narrative challenged them to confront their own role in creating these barriers, even as they grappled with the difficulty of dismantling them. When our proverbial cages are as much about comfort as they are about separation, shifting that mindset requires time, honesty and sustained effort. This is where fiction outshines the case study. While case studies offer tidy solutions to someone else's problems, fiction invites you to wrestle with your own. It mirrors real leadership—messy, uncertain and shaped by perspective. With no real-world stakes, stories let you explore moral complexity, confront bias and explore ideas you might reject in the pressure of work. Narrative As Training For Strategic Thinking Fiction trains leaders to think across multiple, often conflicting timelines—narrated by voices of uncertain reliability. The challenge isn't just to follow the story, but also to decide who to believe. Few novels capture this complexity as powerfully as Hernan Diaz' Pulitzer Prize-winning Trust . Told through four interlocking narratives—a bestselling novel, a self-serving memoir, a ghostwriter's account, and the voice of the main character's long-suffering wife—the story continually reframes what we think we know. Each layer unravels the last, reminding us that truth is often a matter of perspective. This same narrative confusion often plays out at work. Imagine a fairly routine decision to implement a new performance management system. HR sees it as modernization and fairness. Middle managers view it as morale-killing bureaucracy. Senior leadership frames it as much-needed accountability. Employees experience it as mistrust and micromanagement. All perspectives contain truth, so the leader who only hears one risks being blindsided when implementation fails. Books like Trust are the perfect training for the kind of perspective-taking that separates good leaders from great ones. Leaders who can read between the lines of organizational stories become better at diagnosing team dynamics and recognizing the hidden narratives driving resistance to change. Your summer reading matters more than you think. Choose a novel or short story collection that challenges your assumptions and stretches your perspective. While others stick to well-worn management playbooks, you'll be cultivating the empathy, insight, and narrative intelligence that define truly exceptional leaders. Like the private equity leader transformed by a single story, you may find that that fiction doesn't just change what you think—it changes how you see the world and lead through it.
Express Tribune
13-07-2025
- General
- Express Tribune
Gregor Samsa in Pakistan
Listen to article As Gregor Samsa — taking liberties with the character of Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis — awoke one morning, the morning for him wasn't fine at all, even though it was drizzling outside in the sweltering summer. The reason? When he was asleep, he was time-travelled to Pakistan. He was greeted with darkness in the room as rain and electricity never get along well in Pakistan. Samsa stumbled to the water tap to shake off the jet lag by splashing water in his eyes. The tap was desert dry. He turned the tap on and off many a time, but not a single drop of water lingered. He staggered to the kitchen to turn the hob on, but he was out of the schedule for the gas supply. He wondered what part of the world he was at. He threw open the window to have a panoramic view of the world outside. He got perplexed when he saw some porch lights still on. Imbalance and inequality welcome Samsa to Asia — South Asia, to be more specific. Rainbound Samsa, to work from home, tried to turn on his laptop, but its battery was stone dead. His mobile phone also excused itself to help him, as it was on its last leg of battery power. Samsa was dumbfounded, as if he had time-travelled backwards on human civilisation's timeline. Later in the day, Samsa finds that most of the households in the neighbourhood have alternative sources of public services. People have UPS and solar energy installations. People don't depend on the municipal supply of water. They have installed their own water pumps in their houses. They use improvised gas compressors to suck the gas in larger quantities, leaving little for the neighbours who can't afford any alternative source. Samsa laments the individualistic self-sufficiency — too vivid here in its sinister form — spurred by the capitalistic mentalities and state laissez-faire. Samsa divides the households into have-nots and have-mores. He also finds that public services have trust issues here: they leave the house on their whims and come back as if nothing had happened. Before the lure of self-sufficiency, whenever a public service supply went off, the resourceful people pulled a few strings to help restore the supply. In a way, they did a community service. Samsa was surprised that in his land, people asked, "What do you do?" and here it's "Who do you know?" Over time, people got sick of frequent failures of public services. The upper crust of society started having their own sources of utilities. It all disturbed the social balance, making it worse for the have-nots. Samsa smiles at the paradox: those who have alternative sources of public services are accorded more supplies on the platter, while those who survive only on public services get less and disruptive. Disruptions in power supply, cable TV networks and internet supply precipitate the transformation of family entertainment into individualistic digital screen addiction. The youth then laid into by the elders for their addiction feel isolated and search for moorings in other cultures and climes. Samsa muses that in his land, people discussed Brexit, while here it's exit either from jail or from the country. Samsa laughs in his heart of hearts that the country runs on contradictions: late night political talk shows and early morning polycrises snowballing into threats. But he reels and rankles at the commodification of the public service of court justice which is becoming a luxury good. Samsa fails to perceive the failure of democracy, or rather its hijack. He observes democracy in its true form only in the classrooms where the teacher lectures and students vote - with yawns. All this comes down to existential uncertainty and systemic instability. Here, governments are toppled overnight by alien powers or a swish of judicial quill. Political parties are deprived of their identities or granted carte blanche to vandalise the constitution as might suit them. One segment of society enjoys an unprecedented exponential pay rise, while the other (government employees) creeps on roads for disparity reduction allowance. Seeing humans living such an abject existence, Samsa wishes that he remain in the fictional realms in his metamorphosed existence of a giant bug, which he had accepted without any demur.
Time of India
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
10 quirky literary masterpieces every student should read before college
Before academic syllabi teach you how to analyse literature, these ten quirky masterpieces teach you how to experience it. From absurdist novellas to comic sci-fi and meta-narratives, this curated list helps college-bound students reflect, laugh, and rethink what it means to read deeply. These are not books for grades — they're companions for growth, self-discovery, and unexpected joy. Before college teaches you how to dissect literature in a classroom, these books teach you how to live with literature. They are strange, layered, often hilarious, and quietly brilliant. books that do not just ask you to read but to reflect, pause, and sometimes, laugh at the absurdities of the world. Here's a reading list for students about to begin their college journeys curated not for completion but for contemplation. The Metamorphosis Author: Franz Kafka Genre: Absurdist fiction / Existential novella Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a bug. No explanation, no dramatics. His family reacts not with horror but inconvenience. Kafka does not offer comfort or clarity, and that's exactly the point. This slim novella challenges readers to grapple with alienation and identity in ways that feel eerily relevant to young adulthood. For students on the brink of entering a world that will repeatedly ask them to define their place, this is a haunting, essential first lesson. Catch-22 Author: Joseph Heller Genre: Satirical war novel This novel unfolds in the middle of a war, but the real battles are not just in the air, they're in the logic traps and contradictions of military life. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like You Can Make Massive Side Income By Learning Order Flow Analysis TradeWise Learn More Undo Every rule has a loophole, and every escape has a cost. The phrase Catch-22 has become a cultural shorthand for no-win situations, and Heller's work is its origin story. For students preparing to navigate university bureaucracy, this book is a clever and often dizzying primer on how systems break down and people cope within them. Slaughterhouse-Five Author: Kurt Vonnegut Genre: Science fiction / Metafiction Billy Pilgrim is 'unstuck in time.' He moves between his experiences as a soldier in World War II and moments with aliens on a distant planet. This sounds like science fiction, and it is, but it is also an anti-war novel, a meditation on grief, and a study of narrative form. Vonnegut's quiet refrain — 'so it goes', after every death teaches students a hard, necessary truth: life's chaos is often beyond understanding, and still, we must continue. Waiting for Godot Author: Samuel Beckett Genre: Absurdist drama / Existential play Two men wait on a road, Godot never comes. Not much happens, yet everything happens. Beckett's play is an academic favourite because it resists interpretation. For college-bound students, it offers early exposure to the complexities of meaning-making. What do we do while waiting for things we cannot control? Why do we keep going? These are questions that arrive early in college life. Beckett simply asks them sooner. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Author: Douglas Adams Genre: Comic science fiction Earth is destroyed in the first few pages and a man in a bathrobe is saved by a friend who turns out to be an alien. They travel across galaxies with nothing but a towel and dry wit. Douglas Adams's cult classic is wildly entertaining, but it is also sneakily philosophical. Beneath the absurdity is a gentle reminder that most of life's big questions do not have answers, and sometimes, the smartest thing to do is laugh while asking them anyway. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Author: Italo Calvino Genre: Postmodern fiction / Metafiction This book begins with you, the reader, trying to read If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Then the book changes. Again, and again. Calvino crafts a literary puzzle where each chapter becomes a new story and a new voice. For students about to spend years reading critically, this novel is a bold introduction to meta-fiction and narrative experimentation. It gently destabilises traditional ideas of plot, identity, and authorship and does so with quiet charm. The Importance of Being Earnest Author: Oscar Wilde Genre: Comedy of manners / Satirical play Before sarcasm had a name, Wilde mastered it. This Victorian comedy of manners takes on double lives, mistaken identities, and the absurdity of social conventions. Every line is sharp, deliberate, and quotable. At just over an hour to read, it is brief but brilliant. Students stepping into adulthood will appreciate how Wilde pokes fun at what society expects one to do. One Hundred Essays I Don't Have Time to Write Author: Sarah Ruhl Genre: Essay collection / Literary non-fiction Ruhl is a playwright but in this collection, she becomes a thinker on everyday life. Her essays are short, observational, and surprisingly profound. Topics range from parenthood to punctuation. For students with shrinking attention spans and expanding workloads, this book models how intellectual reflection can thrive in fragments. It is a reminder that writing and thinking need not be long to be meaningful. Me Talk Pretty One Day Author: David Sedaris Genre: Humorous autobiographical essays Sedaris's essays on trying to learn French in Paris, coping with a lisp, and navigating eccentric family dynamics are deeply funny but never cruel. His humour disarms without dismissing the awkwardness of becoming an adult. For students anxious about entering new environments, Sedaris offers proof that vulnerability and wit can coexist, and even flourish. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Author: Mark Haddon Genre: Mystery / Coming-of-age fiction Told from the perspective of a teenage boy on the autism spectrum, this novel is part mystery, part coming-of-age story. Christopher wants to solve the case of a dead dog, what unfolds is a tender and mathematical journey through grief, truth, and emotional discovery. It is a necessary read for young adults learning to value different ways of seeing, thinking, and being. Before you begin reading This list is not about reading the longest books or the most awarded ones. It is about encountering voices that defy easy categorisation, about spending time with ideas that do not resolve neatly. In college, you will be taught how to write papers about literature. Before that, let literature write something to you. Something odd, something essential and something that stays. Ready to navigate global policies? Secure your overseas future. Get expert guidance now!
India.com
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- India.com
6 Best Works of Franz Kafka: Stories That Changed Modern Literature
photoDetails english 2908398 Franz Kafka, is renowned for his exploration of themes like alienation, existential anxiety, and the absurdity of bureaucracy. His distinct, surreal style often called "Kafkaesque" is evident in works such as The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle, and In the Penal Colony. Scroll to read more about him. Updated:May 30, 2025, 03:23 PM IST About Kafka 1 / 7 Franz Kafka was born on 3rd July, 1833 in Prague, Czechia. His work explores themes of alienation, existential dread, and oppressive bureaucracy. Kafka's writing style is marked by dark humor, and nightmarish scenarios, often referred to as "Kafkaesque'. The Metamorphosis 2 / 7 This iconic novel was published in 1915, The story shows the tension between individual identity and societal roles. The protagonist's emotional journey highlights the cruelty of conditional love and the deep human need for understanding. The Castle 3 / 7 This novel was published in 1926 in an unfinished book, The novel delves into themes of bureaucracy, alienation, and the search for meaning. Kafka portrays a confusing, indifferent system that frustrates K's, the protagonist's every effort. In The Penal Colony 4 / 7 Published in 1919, this short story examines themes of justice, punishment, and blind adherence to tradition. Kafka's storytelling triggers discomfort and contemplation, using stark imagery and ethical ambiguity to challenge the reader's sense of fairness and authority. The Trial 5 / 7 This amazing novel was published in 1925. The book explores existential anxiety, powerlessness, and the human longing for clarity and justice. The protagonist, Josef K., is arrested and prosecuted by a mysterious and inaccessible legal system. The charges against him are never revealed. Letters to Milena 6 / 7 These deeply personal letters offer a rare glimpse into Kafka's emotional world. Addressed to Milena Jesenská, his beloved, they reveal themes of longing, vulnerability, love, and spiritual connection and the fact that despite their intimacy, Kafka and Milena never lived together which makes these letters more intimate. The Hunger Artist 7 / 7 Published in 1922, is a short story that follows a professional artist who performs public fasting as an art form. Over time, audiences lose interest in his act, and he is forgotten by his audience. The story explores themes of isolation, misunderstood artistry, and existential longing.
Scroll.in
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Punishment in search of a crime: Franz Kafka's ‘The Trial' turns 100
'A book,' a 20-year-old Franz Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Pollack in 1904, 'must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.' It is a quintessential Kafka image. I see an ice-axe, the sharpened point of its curved metal head shattering a vast plane of ice into hairline curves that ramify in all directions. This kind of blow, this shattering of the surface of the world, produced one the greatest novels ever written, The Trial, and introduced to literature one of its most compelling characters, Joseph K, a senior bank clerk doomed to a tragic fate. In its opening sentences, the novel's premise is established with lightning speed. One workday morning, K wakes up to find two strange men in his bedroom, who inexplicably place him under arrest. Later, he is sentenced to death for a crime he knows nothing about by a judge he never sees. One hundred years after its publication on April 26, 1925, the blow of that axe is still being felt. The feeling it engenders is crystallised in a single adjective: 'Kafkaesque'. It is a modifier that has become as famous as Kafka himself. The Trial was written over the period 1914-15, when Kafka was in his early 30s. Like his two other novels – Amerika (alternatively known as The Man Who Disappeared) and The Castle – it was never finished. Kafka was a perfectionist who, as his diaries reveal, struggled with his artistic self-worth. He published little in his lifetime: two short story collections, some story extracts, and his novella The Metamorphosis, which went largely unnoticed. We would not even have the novels if not for the intervention of Kafka's close friend and literary executor Max Brod. Thankfully, Brod ignored Kafka's instructions to destroy his manuscripts after his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 40 in 1924. The Trial was the first of the novels to be published posthumously, with the others appearing soon after. The Kafkaesque Fellow Czech writer Milan Kundera, whose youth was shaped by Stalinist communism, characterised the Kafkaesque as a state of powerlessness when trapped inside a boundless labyrinth. He also saw in it an inversion of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. No longer is a crime met with a punishment; rather, the punishment goes in search of a crime. For poststructuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka pioneered the notion of a 'neo-bureaucracy' of 'corridors, of segments, a string of offices' that marked 'the transition from the old archaic imperial bureaucracy to modern bureaucracy'. They found Kafka's worldview so powerful that they incorporated it into their influential theories of capitalism and schizophrenia. Joseph K's grisly fate plays out in an anonymised city, most likely derived from Kafka's home of Prague. The city's Austro-Hungarian ornamentation is stripped to bone, leaving only a kind of proto-brutalist substratum. It's a powerful setting. Has a writer ever generated so much strangeness and awe, so much psychological power, with such basic materials? Much of the novel's action occurs in genteel boarding houses, bank offices, run-down tenements, a dilapidated artist's studio, a quarry. Its potentially grandest setting, a cathedral, is rendered in dark, blurry tones. From these modest elements, Kafka builds vast panoramas, sweeping landscapes, all in the theatre of the mind. It is a phantasmagoria assembled from the world of concrete things – Kafka is nothing if not a writer of specificity – yet it seems to be moulded from some kind of dark matter, the very stuff of consciousness: sensory data that is as close to mind as the senses can be, but which dissolves in instant, only to reconfigure as a new room, a new office, a new studio. In these rooms, a varied cast of characters orbit the hapless K, each exerting an influence, both direct and indirect, on his fate. In K's personal world, there are his landlady, his love interests, bank colleagues, his uncle and guardian. In the world of the trial, which increasingly bleeds into every aspect of his existence, there are the petty officials, his lawyer, the painter, the priest. In his encounters with them, K shows the many sides of his personality. He is, by turns, polite and dismissive, decorous and licentious, driven by a burning sense of injustice, yet prone to periods of lassitude. What he is not is paranoid. The theme of paranoia is central in The Trial (and in the Kafkaesque itself), but it exists at a much more pervasive level than that of the mere individual. To see K as paranoid limits our understanding of what Kafka is trying to achieve. In fact, K's response to his arrest is anything but paranoid. He displays a misplaced confidence that everything will turn out for the best. Instead of fearing the invisible forces arrayed against him, he is often combative and sardonic, ruining his chances of acquittal at every turn. In Kafka's Weltanschauung, the world itself has become irrational, arbitrary and malevolent: a machine for the production of paranoia. K's stance is that of someone who is trying to remain sane in a world gone mad. One way he does this is by refusing to internalise the values of a perverted system. He is innocent, as far as he is concerned, and never passes up an opportunity to declare it. His naivety in the face of the court is his purity. There is no court more perverse than the one found in The Trial. It is ingeniously staged, revealed to us only in glimpses. We first physically encounter one of its offices on the top floor of a working-class tenement building. A small door is opened at the back of a cramped, grubby flat and behind it, where we least expect, is a large, crowded room, buzzing with the activity of the hearings in session. This is where K attends his first and only hearing. Like the tenement building, the room is dirty and dilapidated. The hearing is a farce. The magistrate mistakes K for a house painter. Because of his strenuous proclamations of innocence, K's hearing never gets off the ground. Later, K visits this room again when the court is out of session and takes the opportunity to nose around. Examining the magistrate's reference books, he sees that one is full of clumsy pornographic drawings. Another is titled 'What Greta Suffered from her Husband Franz'. The Trial is full of such absurd humour, trompe l'oeil effects, and manipulations of scale. It also contains touches of what would come to be called surrealism. For example, when the amorous wife of the court attendant shows K her hand as she tries to woo him, she reveals that two of her fingers are joined by an overgrown web of skin. Though we see little of the court, we experience it everywhere through its proxies and their endless discussions on how it operates. K's lawyer, the bedridden Herr Huld, describes a network of judges that 'mounted endlessly, so that not even adepts could survey the hierarchy as a whole'. In lengthy monologues, Huld explains the court's endlessly deferred processes. Reports can be drafted, only to have their completion delayed for any number of reasons. Even if they are submitted, they usually end up circulating up and down the system in great recursive loops with no definitive outcome. Titorelli, the court painter to whom K is sent to progress his case (even though he has no official status), describes the behind-the-scenes operations of the court. There is the lobbying of judges that must be pursued in order to influence the outcome. Verdicts, Titorelli points out, can only end in a pronouncement of guilt, but not necessarily death. K's best option, he advises, is to admit his guilt, but to choose a category where final sentencing is deferred, perhaps forever, perhaps not: there are no guarantees. His case could be reactivated at any time, resulting in the gravest of consequences, or perhaps never – who could tell? How is an increasingly dispirited K meant to negotiate such a menacing world, accept its insane norms? The priest in the penultimate chapter proffers an answer. K should not 'accept everything as true, only as necessary'. K responds: 'A melancholy conclusion […] It turns lying into a universal principle.' Dialectic of unenlightenment Part of the dramatic brilliance of The Trial is the way Kafka brings all of this deferral and recursion to an abrupt halt in the form of the ultimate act of closure: death. In its combination of menace and comedy, K's execution is arguably one of the most chilling chapters in all of literature. It has the hallmarks of a sacrifice, but one that has no point, no reason or explanation. On the eve of his 31st birthday, one year after his arrest, K's executioners, taciturn men dressed in black, appear in his room. They frogmarch him out of town to a disused quarry, where they lay him out on a stone and, under the moonlight, plunge a knife through his heart. Everything about the execution is primaeval, ritualistic, atavistic. What is the nature of this nightmare world, where such an arbitrary execution can take place? It is not only a world where lying is the norm, a world where reason has lost its way: it is much worse than that. This nightmare world consciously works at every point against reason, against the Enlightenment belief that reason leads us to a truth. Any possibility that humanity is continuously improving, that each successive generation draws closer to the truth, is repudiated. Within the ideals of the Enlightenment, The Trial suggests, there lurks the dark glow of the irrational, the persistence of a power that loves nothing but itself, a power that will destroy capriciously and without explanation. This is illustrated in the novel's final scene. K finally acquiesces to his fate and dies, to use his own words, 'like a dog'. With this thrust of the dagger, Kafka sets in motion a reverse teleology, a dialectic of unenlightenment, one where we fall backwards into a corrupt moral order we believed we had transcended, at least in principle. 'I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us,' the young Kafka wrote in his letter to Oskar Pollak. 'If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?' Kafka is still waking us up, 100 years after the publication of The Trial. Whenever power goes awry, serving sinister forces that enact the law according to a perverse set of whims it calls justice, we know we are in the world of the Kafkaesque. Yes, Kafka's worldview, for all its comedy, is bleak and dark. But it sheds a unique light: the kind of illumination of human nature that is essential, revealing aspects that, once seen, cannot be unseen. Without it, we would not only be asleep; we would also be blind.
