Franz Kafka
Il Processo

Entering Kafka's "The Trial" is stepping into a 250-page nightmare. From the first pages, you immediately get lost in the meanders and meshes of a sticky and shifting "justice," of a dinosauric, abject bureaucracy, hypocritically mediocre, in a vulgar carousel of the absurd, where you never end up on the ground, because you end up directly underground.

It is in this dark magma that Josef K. finds himself ensnared against his will, trying to piece together a mosaic but having only white tiles... or black if you prefer.

The beginning is both powerful and disorienting. Early in the morning, two officials burst into his room to deliver him a court summons. K is summoned to trial, for what is not known, but it seems serious.

Thus begins the odyssey of a man, a young bank clerk, not so much in search of "truth" but rather of the motivations, the circumstances, in short, the why of it all. He will never receive even the slightest answer and instead will find himself increasingly mired in the tons of mud that the "system" will dump on him, without understanding why.

Although one finds oneself in the literature of the absurd, within a visionary and delirious context, surreal and dramatic, the sensation of discomfort experienced when reading and trying to understand is real.

The anxiety and anguish of K. perfectly reflect in the reader in this open-eyed, morbid, and tentacular nightmare. The black wing of Justice looms over K. and all of us, spreading and alluding and threatening, represented by the multiple characters our protagonist encounters in his whirlwind wandering within an infernal labyrinth. Whether they are judges or lawyers, clerks or modest officials, "expert" clients who find themselves in the same situation as K., maybe even much longer than him, all are represented in a crooked and alien manner. Everything seems as inevitable as it is incomprehensible. K. will fight with all his might against this oppressive Justice, against this opaque, dark entity, as powerful as it is imperfect, yet finding himself increasingly tired and lost, increasingly assailed by doubts about his questions, rather than by answers. It will be a fight against a gigantic windmill with blades that spin incessantly, tirelessly and relentlessly.

The Trial, along with The Castle and America, make up a work of extraordinary importance in modern literature. Perhaps never before has the human psyche been explored with such precision and without compromises. A "modern" man adrift, lost in incommunicability towards his fellow human beings, trapped in the meshes of an obtuse and arbitrary system, which, if it fails to give you a concrete guilt, nonetheless assigns you a sense of guilt. A consumed and consuming man, forcefully pushed into the diabolical circuit of live-produce-die without even a scrap of explanation.

A novel "saturated with unhappiness." (Primo Levi).