The Castle

The Land Surveyor K. has received an order to work at the Castle. After a long journey through the snow he finally arrives at its surrounding village, but his welcome is considerably less than warm: his attempts to find out how he should start his job and whom he should speak to are undermined by pompous officials and a general sense of disbelief that he should even be there at all. The Castle remains stubbornly out of reach, and its structures seem almost purposefully designed to trigger K.’s spiral into a bureaucratic nightmare. The Castle was the second of Franz Kafka’s three great novels