The trial
(Book)

Originally published in 1914.

Publishers and dates vary.

Treated as a "blanket" record for the classic title. Other versions with criticism, illustrations, adaptations, etc. cataloged separately.

Josef K. is an employee at a bank, an Everyman without any particular qualities or ambitions. His inconsequence makes doubly strange his arrest by an officer of the court, made with no formal charges or explanation. Disoriented and consumed with guilt for a crime he does not understand, Josef K. must justify his life to a court with which he cannot communicate. The defendant can only ask questions, but receives no answers to clarify the surreal world in which he is compelled to wander. Through the court's relentless bureaucratic proceedings and absurd juxtapositions of different hypotheses of cause and effect, the whole rational structure of the world is undermined. The trial of Josef K. becomes a chilling existential metaphor for life itself, where every sentence is a sentence of death.