The Trial was certainly... a trial. As a buddy read, we kept encountering ill luck while reading it. Either one of us would fall sick, or her ebook reader crashed, or my lungs suffered. I don't know what Kafka did while writing this but it felt very cursed.

Once again I am irked by the format of his novels, in which he seemed allergic to using paragraphs. Pages were filled with huge blocks of words with no spacings, which made it quite confusing to move through this story that is already confusing plot-wise.

Josef K was an unlikeable character (and not in a good way. Trust me. I often love books with terrible characters). He was (pardon my French) an ass. He was a menace to every woman he encountered (and boy, there were quite a few), to the men in the trial, to his maid and neighbours, and to his uncle. I could not pity this man at all and I wouldn't mind arresting him myself. He was a Scrooge in a Kafka way.

The book felt like if someone were to play with the volume dial. One second it's loud, and another it's quiet. My interest in the story went up and down. Some were interesting, some were so boring it was like reading white noise. We do not speak of Chapter 7. Whatever that was. 

However I do applaud Kafka in his ability to write such a grimy book. I felt so suffocated and dirty, like I'm stuck beneath a centipede's belly. Stomach-dropping, headache-inducing, dread-filling book; that's what The Trial was for me.