Like George Orwell Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare but in Kafka's world it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is The Trial where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials & if there is any help to be had it will come from unexpected sources is a chilling blackly amusing tale that maintains to the very end a relentless atmosphere of disorientation Superficially about bureaucracy it is in the last resort a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature Still more enigmatic is The Castle Is it an allegory of a quasi-feudal system giving way to a new freedom for the subject? The search by a central European Jew for acceptance into a dominant culture? A spiritual quest for grace or salvation? An individual's struggle between his sense of independence & his need for approval? Is it all of these things? & K? Is he opportunist victim or an outsider battling against elusive authority? Finally in his fables Kafka deals in dark & quirkily humorous terms with the insoluble dilemmas of a world which offers no reassurance & no reliable guidance to resolving our existential & emotional uncertainties & anxieties