Leaving The Castle

Kafka writes like nobody else except Kafka. What we tend to think of as Kafkaesque isn't: the craziness of bureaucracy, the anxiety of being born guilty, the mad logic of officialdom, the brooding menace, the midnight knock upon the door - it's still not close to what Kafka actually does. And what does he do? All sorts of things that are not what other writers do. He doesn't describe, well not in any very obvious way beyond the bare necessities. He doesn't create characters, not stable ones anyway. He doesn't tell a story, not one that goes anywhere, and since you know this from the beginning, certainly in The Castle, it doesn't much matter. So he doesn't finish and the novel being unfinished actually seems just right. The perfect non-ending.

Some things he does do then. He assaults the reader's sense of whatever the reader thinks is taking place. In The Castle we remorselessly revisit situations and characters we may have thought we had a handle on only to find that everything might be, probably is, different from what we thought, but it doesn't much matter since next time round our perspectives will be shifted yet again. He drenches us in power, status and sexuality until these seem to be the only realities accounting for human behaviour, but since none of the behaviour makes any real sense these fixed points seem illusory. He makes us laugh, remorselessly, until the laughter begins to grate when the joke has gone on too long, and then he lets it go on even longer.

He doesn't let go, even when we put the book down and leave the castle walls. He shows us ourselves and it's not pretty.

Surely K. must be amongst the least likeable characters in literature?