A Kafkaesque Review?

She ducked out of the rainstorm into a bookstore. There was nothing in particular she was looking for, but one book caught her eye, she picked it up, walked to the counter, and bought it, seeing nothing and no one but the book. She felt the weight of it in the plastic bag as she left the store and went back into the weather, experiencing a strange sense of gratitude that the bag was waterproof. The rain fell freely on her graying head. She knew her hair would go frizzy but for once she didn't seem to mind. She walked purposefully through the vertical downpour, trying to work out how she could have reached the age of 52 without reading Kafka. The thought was ludicrous, uncomfortable, perhaps even shameful. But was he worth reading? She wouldn't know until she read him. The volume contained two short works, The Metamorphosis and The Trial. All she knew about Kafka was a vague recollection that she had picked up somewhere that he wrote a famous story about a man who woke up one morning having turned into a cockroach. This sounded grotesque and hideous. She hoped the story was more than that, that it would have some depth, some hidden meaning. Oh well, if nothing else, finally, she would be enabled to see for herself what the word "Kafkaesque" meant.

She did see for herself. But first she learned a bit about Kafka himself. It always helped to know something about the author. (She had gathered that only some authors are artists, painting beyond what the eye sees, guiding rather than merely reflecting, and she was curious to know if he was one of those.) Born 1883 in Prague, Jewish parents, educated in German, law degree, insurance officer while working to become a writer, almost but never married, died of tuberculosis in 1924 at or around 41, few works. She pictured the man who struggled and suffered and died young as she read his words. She found herself so startled by them that she forgot to eat regular meals. She kept wondering if the story Metamorphosis was about what it seemed to be about on the surface, but something told her it couldn't be. That would be a waste. In the end she realized gratefully, joyously, that it was not about Gregor Samsa turning into an insect at all, but the family, the unhealthy dependence on him they had slumped into, his co-dependence, and their gradual emancipation, in other words, there can be no growth without a sense of freedom. Excellent. She read on hungrily. The second work, The Trial, was a short novel she soon found to be a meticulously crafted allegory of a generic lost soul, Joseph K., and the frustrations he inevitably endures without the benefit of objective principles and rules, without mercy, and without divine redemption. This is like a dark, hopeless Pilgrim's Progress, she surmised. The long ordeal comes to an incomprehensible, horrific end, but just before he is formally executed for crimes he is never made aware of (or perhaps never acknowledges himself?), K. sees a figure leaning out a faraway window, stretching out arms toward the doomed everyman. "Who was that? A friend? A good person? Somebody who was taking part? Somebody who wanted to help?" Nevertheless, by his executioners he is then stabbed in the heart, the knife twisted twice. And "where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached?" Yes, she thought, this is where men would be without that great Reality beyond this one. Who needed food, or shelter from rain, she asked herself, when there were otherworldly truths, and lasting subsequent comforts, like these to be had?