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So, I just found out about the new Schocken editions slated to come out in June this year. When first I laid eyes on I thought, hey! what's with all the color? For some reason I imagined reading these with a Kafka martini in front of me, with soft Kafka jazz playing in the background. However after reading 's reasoning behind the vivid designs I thought, Yes, exactly right. There's always a lot of talk about Kafka as some kind of prophet of alienation and doom, which, yeah, he was, but we tend to forget that he was also hysterically funny and imaginative and playful.

Here's given by David Foster Wallace on the essential funniness of the man.

What are some of your funniest moments in Kafka?

Probably my favorite is the scene in The Trial called "The Whipper." Joseph K discovers a little broom closet at his job where the two men who ate his breakfast at the beginning of the book are being whipped. Of course it can be read darkly, revealing how our own comfortable lives are often the result of the invisible suffering of others. But it's also an injection of hilarity into K's work day. The ongoing joke throughout The Trial of the injustice of those men eating K's breakfast just kills me.

A new edition by Schocken... You don't say -- I'm willing to bet it's just a spruced up OLD translation from the Muirs! How they milk it... Na ja, so it goes.

Oh, of course. And though I know there are perhaps more faithful translations out there (perhaps yours, Phillip!) we wouldn't want these original translations to just go away, right? And as long as they are reprinting them they might as well give them the face lift they need. Maybe it's the wet San Francisco climate but all my old Schocken editions, the ones with the morose matte and gloss black covers, curl like crazy. It leaves those staid Muir translations looking a little ridiculous. (Not that I actually plan on buying them again, but for posterity's sake I guess.)

Not a real moment, but I found K.'s bizarre ways of gauging his relative value or class compared to other people. I liked that scene when he was dealing with the red-head in the court, and how K. felt superior over him because of their relative organizational rankings, even though during that time, K. still suspected the legitimacy of the courts. It's so petty and ridiculous, but so painfully real.

I find most of "The Trial" very-darkly funny... even though it is horrifying.

I even published a satirical short story, that synthesizes and combines `The Trial' and `Metamorphosis'...

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...

I feel there has been no author before or since Kafka, who captures the essence of being trapped inside a nightmare.

Interestingly, Orson Welles is most-remembered for the film "Citizen Kane" - but always insisted his favorite film (of his own) was the adaptation he made of "The Trial"...

Our age is "trapped in nightmare" until and unless we can get out of it > but Kafka's "Prozess" does also have answers (in a way) > I'm meaning the next to last chapter where K. meets with the "priest" in the cathedral and is presented with the parable: Before the Law >> which, I might note, does point to the solution...

That's really interesting. Never thought of Before the Law as a solution. What do you think it's suggesting? A kind of civil disobedience of the soul?

Also, as far as funny goes: the 2 assistants "as alike as two snakes" from The Castle are just pure comedy. The 2 henchmen from the last chapter of The Trial are pretty funny in a creepy way, too. I wonder what it is Kafka likes about doubles and why he draws them so cartoonishly.

Frida Fantastic wrote: "Not a real moment, but I found K.'s bizarre ways of gauging his relative value or class compared to other people. I liked that scene when he was dealing with the red-head in the court, and how K. f..."

Oh so true. Ridiculous and painfully real. I especially like these ridiculous assumptions when they come the other way around. Like how in Amerika or The Castle others just assume that Karl or K is some kind of blackguard or smarmy, suspicious individual. It's like the protagonist has a shabby look to him that he (and the reader) can't see.

Not so much a "civil disobedience" as more a reorientation, and note too that the parable is just the elementary lesson > one has to get beneath our conceptions of "law" to a domain that normally is off-limits, beyond the threshold of the way the world seems to be...