内容简介
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Arriving in a village to take
up the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of a
castle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter and
baffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about his
duties. As the villagers and the Castle officials block his efforts
at every turn, K.'s consuming quest-quite possibly a self-imposed
one-to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take its
measure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that the
would-be surveyor in "The Castle" is driven by a wish "to get clear
about ultimate things," an unrealizable desire that provided the
driving force behind all of Kafka's dazzlingly uncanny fictions.
Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
作者简介
The son of a well-to-do merchant, Franz Kafka was born in
Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanitorium near Vienna
in 1924. After earning a law degree in 1906, he worked most of his
adult life at the Workers Accident Insurance Company for the
Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Only a small portion of his writings
were published during his lifetime; most of them, including the
three unfinished novels, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle, were
published posthumously.
Mark Harman holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and has taught
German and Irish literature at Oberlin and Dartmouth. In addition
to writing scholarly essays on Kafka and other modern authors, he
has edited and co-translated Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories,
Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses and has translated Soul of
the Age: Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse, 1891-1962. He teaches
literature at the University of Pennsylvania. --This text refers to
an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.