Franz Kafka - O Castelo

Crystallized in the heart of a perpetual winter, stands a bare castle, so blurred into the landscape that it resembles a miserable little town with a cluster of village houses.

K. is a surveyor, or perhaps not, recruited to offer his services there by the invisible Count Westwest and the enigmatic and unreachable "lords of the Castle."

Lost in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the county administration, K. wanders through the village, where he is unwelcome, becomes sexually involved with a shop assistant, jumps from one hostel to another, finally accepting the position of caretaker at the school.

In his unmistakable breathless writing, Franz Kafka imprints in *The Castle*, a posthumous and unfinished novel (like all three he wrote), the power of a narrative that delves into waiting, frustration, and powerlessness in the face of a murky and insurmountable world.

This translation, by Álvaro Gonçalves, follows the original manuscript (which Kafka began writing in January 1922 and definitively interrupted in September of the same year), thus eliminating the profound alterations introduced by his friend and executor Max Brod in its first edition of 1926.