Mark André ’s Reviews > The Castle > Status Update

Only her little face showed now in the candlelight, its clear, stern features softened by the ravages of age.

I have to tell you the whole, if unwelcome, truth. You have been engaged, you say, as a land sur- veyor, but unfortunately we don’t need a land surveyor. There wouldn’t be any work for you here at all.

they deprived him of the chance of winning small, easy victories . . . and the well-justified confidence that he would then derive from them . . . Instead, the authorities allowed K. to go anywhere he liked, although only inside the village, thus indulging him but weakening his position, ruling out any possibility of a struggle, and leaving him living a non-official, unpredictable, troubled, and strange kind of life.

Mr Land Surveyor, I will give you a piece of information to take with you, for whatever you may say and what- ever insults you may offer me, poor old woman that I am, you are Frieda’s future husband. It’s only on that account that I tell you how shockingly ignorant you are of circumstances here, a person’s head fairly spins just listening to you, comparing what you say and think with the situation as it really is.

She was in search of something and so was he, they tried to get at it almost angrily, ... their embraces and writhing bodies did not bring oblivion but reminded them of their duty to go on searching. Like dogs desperately scraping at the ground, they worked away at one another’s bodies, helplessly disappointed as they tried to retrieve the last of their bliss, sometimes licking each other’s faces with their tongues.

There was something cheerful and easygoing in her demeanour which K. hadn’t noticed at all before, and now, improbably, it gained the upper hand as she suddenly bent down to K., smiling and saying: ‘Maybe he’s hidden down here.’ She quickly kissed him and then popped up again, saying regretfully: ‘No, he isn’t here.’

Olga spoke to K. quietly and as if she knew him well. It was pleasant to walk with her, just as it had been pleasant with her brother. K. fought against this sense of pleasure, but it was there.

‘How am I to know which of you is which? The only difference between you is your names, and apart from that’—he hesitated— ‘apart from that you’re as like as two snakes.’ They smiled.

It was as if some melancholy inhabitant of the place, who should really have stayed locked up in the most remote room in the house, had broken through the roof and was standing erect to show himself to the world.

I always prefer to be a free agent.