Mark André ’s Reviews > The Castle > Status Update

. . . there were bottles in the side pocket there too. He took one out, unscrewed the top, and sniffed it. Instinctively he smiled; the smell was as sweet and delight- ful as hearing praise and kind words from someone you love, and you don’t know why, nor do you want to know, you are just happy to hear the beloved person uttering them. Can this really be cognac?

Above all, if you don’t hear anything from the castle today, you are really unlikely to find a bed for the night anywhere in the village of which I myself, as your future wife, would not be ashamed. And if you don’t get a bed for the night, are you going to expect me to sleep here in this warm room, while I know that you are wandering outside in the dark and the cold?’

‘Did she give an opinion on anything?’ asked the landlady.
‘No,’ said K. ‘And I didn’t get any impression that she could.’
‘Ah, well,’ said the landlady, ‘you have the wrong idea of everything here.’

‘I will listen calmly to everything you have to say. I would rather you spoke openly than think you were sparing me. I have only one request. Do not mention Klamm’s name. Call him “he”, or something else, but don’t call him by his name.’

. . . she had taken the picture back, and now she looked at it, smoothed it out, and pushed it under the pillow again. Her movements were slower now, but not from weariness, they were slow under the burden of memory.

‘I’ve been at daggers drawn with him.

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.