“The castle”

Kafka

Kafka began working on the novel The Castle in 1921, but largely completed it the following year. On March 15 of that year he read the initial part to his friend Max Brod.

In a letter arriving on 11 September, again to Max Brod, Kafka complains of not being able to translate into words the “demonic character of the figures in the novel” and concludes that he has interrupted “the story of the Castle forever”.

These were the years in which tuberculosis worsened and hospitalizations became more frequent. Kafka dies two years later, hospitalized in the Kierling sanatorium.

The manuscript, which according to Kafka’s instructions should have been burned upon his death, has only one subdivision and was without a title. Max Brod edited the first edition in 1926, dividing the work into twenty chapters and titling it Das Schloss (The Castle), as Kafka usually called it.