​Three things to know about Kafka. First his friend asked him if he believed in a spiritual world, and Kafka replied that he thought there was only one world, and then added that the one world he was thinking of WAS the spiritual world — the physical world, he said, was the Evil in the spiritual world. The other thing to know about Kafka is that when he read his stories people roared with laughter — we have lost the COMIC absurdity of his stuff. Third, David Lynch’s character in Twin Peaks has two pictures on his office wall: Kafka and a nuclear bomb going off. Let’s get a handle on the guy who Harold Bloom said, alongside Proust and Freud, dominated the 20th century.

​This is the story of a land surveyor who comes to work in a village with a castle and oh my god you guys he never does get to that castle and it actually might not be a castle at all. It’s a terrifying book about GOD, or at least some structure god has long abandoned. It’s also about the deep insanity of bureaucracy. Also weirdly Michael Haneke, who did Funny Games, made a movie about The Castle in 1997?