THE CASTLE

Kafka's great allegory (originally published, posthumously, in 1926) of a supposed surveyor adrift in a "castle," which may be no more than a collection of random buildings, memorably expresses his distinctive vision of a formless and secretive world that frustrates our efforts to comprehend it.

This compulsively readable new translation, based on a text "restored'" from the author's original manuscript, labors to replace the standard English version (by Willa and Edwin Muir) that had "tone[d] down Kafka's ominousness'' and "normalized" his deliberately eccentric syntax and punctuation. In either translation, The Castle is a major modern symbolist work, and it's good to have it in print once again.