20th Century Castle (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

The story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home, seems to depict, like a dream from the deepest recesses of consciousness, an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. In his introduction, Idris Parry shows that duality-to Kafka a perpetual human condition-lies at the heart of this essentially imaginative magnum opus: dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, reason and nonsense, harmony and disintegration. Thus, The Castle is an unfinished novel that feels strangely complete, in which a labyrinthine world, described in simple language and absurd fantasy, reveals a profound truth.