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...

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