It is amazing how much the inner spirit of a work can resonate with the reader's worldview. "The Castle" is so clear and close to me intuitively that it even becomes irrelevant the fact that with my mind I definitely do not see all the levels of meaning and nuances of the work that the author has put there.
Franz Kafka was one of the major fiction writers of the 20th century. He was born to a middle-class German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Bohemia (presently the Czech Republic), Austria–Hungary. His unique body of writing—much of which is incomplete and which was mainly published posthumously—is considered to be among the most influential in Western literature.
The world described by Kafka is absolutely real and absolutely absurd at the same time. So is our life, in fact. A surveyor receives an invitation to work in a certain Castle, he arrives in a village near the Castle, and then the strangest thing begins. Everyone knows about his arrival, but when he is asked when he will come to work in the Castle, the answer is: "Never." How it resembles our life: loving parents (we take most of them as a basis) are waiting for a child to be born, they try to give him the best prospects, to simplify the way...but then it turns out that no one in this world is waiting for us, and "never" is not a metaphor at all. Like the main character, we have two roads: either to accept an unremarkable job somewhere at the bottom of the pyramid, at the bottom of the pyramid, to take what is offered, or to try to make our way to the top of this Castle, to try to find some options to get inside, to get the place you dream of. Except that the Castle is impregnable: the roads to it are blocked with snow, passers-by refuse to give a ride, to influential people who are members of the Castle, it is difficult to get close. And the main character walks a very ambiguous path, which in real life, not everyone is able to step on, due to character and moral principles.
The protagonist is annoying, and most annoying precisely when you notice his familiar features. He behaves completely illogically, he deceives people, tries to ineptly manipulate or, for a change, goes straight ahead, trying to catch his interlocutors unawares. He does everything clumsily, and if at the beginning of the book there is still a sense that this clumsiness is a sign of his lack of adaptation to the system and that he is driven by a desire to break the system, then with each page that is read, these illusions dissipate more and more quickly. He wants to become part of this system even more than the locals do, but he is just taking the easy way out, trying to get around the long road from office to office, from official to official, trying to jump up several steps at once. He thinks he is cunning and clever, but in fact is mediocre little more than completely. So it was a real pleasure for me to read the true from first to last letter characterization that one of the characters gave him.
The entourage at first glance is very similar to our reality: anyone who has ever encountered the workings of government agencies will see a hundred similarities. Important letters that take years to arrive; dozens of offices that redirect visitors to officials who never have the authority to solve the question in question; departments that have no connection with each other; hundreds of thousands of papers that cover the floor of ten circles of hell, which you have to go through to get any kind of answer to your problem...And yet, this system has its perverse logic, which (to your horror) you even begin to understand if you dive deeper into the matter. The protagonist, too, sinks headlong into this maelstrom, forgetting his original purpose, becoming entangled in sticky nets of unimportant events, empty assignments, and petty personalities.
And the interesting thing is that in this Kafkaesque world, there are other places and countries, there is France and Switzerland...there is the rest of the world - warm lands, with blooming gardens and sunny days. There are options where one can go, giving up fruitless attempts to conquer the Castle, to get through hundreds of offices, the impersonal indifference of tons of official documents, and the hard-headedness of people limited to one function - "to serve" -. But this world is somewhere out there, far away, and the Castle is right there, towering as an unassailable wall, beckoning by its grandeur and "elitism", irritating by its inaccessibility. An eternal and never failing trap.
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