“A book,” a 20-year-old Franz Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Pollack in 1904, “must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” It is a quintessential Kafka image. I see an ice-axe, the sharpened point of its curved metal head shattering a vast plane of ice into hairline curves that ramify in all directions.
This kind of blow, this shattering of the surface of the world, produced one the greatest novels ever written, The Trial, and introduced to literature one of its most compelling characters, Joseph K., a senior bank clerk doomed to a tragic fate.
