A few weeks ago by accident I stumbled across Orson Welles’ 1962 version of the Franz Kafka novel The Trial. Intrigued, and knowing next to nothing about Welles, I was next led to the 2015 documentary Magician: the Astonishing Life & Work of Orson Welles which, among other things, suggests that Welles had remade Kafka’s book in his own image. Finally, as my own real life abruptly spiraled into something approaching surrealism, I broke down and bought a copy of Kafka’s novel. The time was ripe to take the plunge.

The copy I bought was Breon Mitchell’s 1998 translation. What struck me most was how little Welles had changed the story in his adaptation. In fact, I would say Welles presented a pretty straight-forward presentation of Kafka. Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 film Kafka has long been a favorite, and now so is the Welles film. If you’re interested in Kafka-the-writer, and/or the novel-version of The Trial, you should look for both of these films.

The book is so well known that a review at this point seems superfluous. Much of the time the reader senses that the book is probably occurring as a dream. The protagonist called K. often demonstrates a profound lack of comprehension of his own mind and psyche, and an insouciant willingness to rationalize away any dissatisfying recognition of his own foibles and unsympathetic propensities. Presumably the guilt of which he is accused arises from these unexamined blemishes on his soul.

In fact The Trial doesn’t gel as a novel. It is a fragmentary first draft of a novel, a work in progress that never found its plot line. It is apparent Kafka kept writing and writing loosely-connected scenes in able to build up settings and characters, but he never quite hammered it all together into a coherent story. The book’s conclusion, while probably inevitable in some form, occurs suddenly and without satisfaction. It is tacked on in a slipshod fashion, and one senses that Kafka composed it quite quickly, almost certainly intending to improve it considerably at a later date that never came.

Still, I have read many legitimate novels which are far more tedious than this unsteady draft. The Trial continues to raise questions about troubling social behaviors that arise in human cultures. Unspoken and unexamined paranoia and guilt are probably destined to be our companions throughout all human history, at least anytime more than two or three individuals interact. Kafka’s vision of that uneasy companionship is a telling one.