The Castle

The great novel by the leading literary mystic and one of the most penetrating philosophical works of the 20th century. A certain K. arrives in a Village to take up the post of surveyor. Only they don’t let him into the Castle— the Village doesn’t accept him either—and he also can’t go home. The world around turns into a labyrinth of absurdity: roads evaporate, people behave strangely, time seems to slow down. For the doors of the Castle to finally open, K. must sort out the local bureaucracy and complete all the necessary authorities. There is one nuance: everyone in the village knows that you can’t get into the Castle just like that, but nobody knows where he should begin.
The absurdity and surrealism of “The Castle” may seem like nonsense, but it’s a completely logical system in which each person discovers the outline of their own failures from their life. The plot consists of a chain of frustrations in which K. unsuccessfully tries to climb the career ladder.
Under the mask of a magical fairy tale and an unclear dream lies everyday reality—banally simple and painfully familiar.
In 2002, the Norwegian Book Club, together with the Nobel Institute, included “The Castle” in the list of the best hundred books of all time. This unique version of the novel contains additional materials by Mikhail Rudnitsky, a well-known translator and Kafka researcher. Thanks to these additions, it becomes even more interesting to follow the novel’s plot twists, and the main character’s motivation becomes clearer.
Thanks to the acting skills of Makar Zaporozhsky, we managed to convey the unusual, mercury-like structure of the last and most mystical novel by Franz Kafka in the audio version.