The Trial - Redux

After yesterday's post, I thought I'd republish a post from January 2016. It follows below.


I'm nearly at the end of rereading Franz Kafka's The Trial. This particular version is not the translation by Willa and Edwin Muir published in 1937, but a copyrighted Project Gutenberg eBook translated by David Wyllie.

It was the translation by Willa and Edwin Muir that I read (or attempted) to read in high school - having been turned on to Kafka by way of one of his short stories being mentioned on a Frank Zappa LP.

Not having the 1937 translation available, I cannot compare it to the Wyllie translation. I don't know if it is because I am much older now than when I first came across the novel, or if Wyllie's translation is superior, but I find the novel easier for me to get through now.

In the wikipedia article covering the work, it's mentioned that The Trial was heavily influenced by Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. I don't see it. Those particular novels are two of my favorites, and I can understand Kafka's being influenced by them, but he does not reach the level of Dostoyevsky. Of course, I read neither Russian nor German - I've only read translations of these great novels - perhaps if I read German, I could see a closer relationship between the two writers.

On the Project Gutenberg web page where the book is made available, it gives the option of having a version with or without images. Unfortunately, although it says that there are images available, it is not the case. There are no illustrations for this translation. I remember being very impressed by the illustrations used in the original Willa and Edwin Muir translations. I'm a little disappointed that there aren't any for Wyllie's work, but otherwise, I've no complaint with this new translation.

Flannery O'Kafka

During the week that my pc was out of commission, I was able to catch up on my reading using my Kindle, particularly the two novels by Flannery O'Connor that I had been meaning to read for quite some time - Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away.

The Wikipedia article on O'Conner states something that I had often read about her and her writing - "Her writing reflected her Roman Catholic religion and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics."

I don't mean this as a criticism of O'Conner, but I found little (or no) evidence of Catholic thought in her two novels. Don't get me wrong; I found her novels to be genuine masterpieces, but I never would have known O'Conner's religious leanings simply by reading her novels. There is an element of an anti-Pentecostal viewpoint, but that isn't necessarily Roman Catholic.

Yes, O'Conner's novel are masterpieces, but they are a bit bizarre and grotesque as well.

To bring my thoughts back to normal, so to speak, I needed to begin reading something less grotesque. I choose Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial.

The jpeg at the beginning of this post contains randomly chosen photos of Kafka and O'Conner. After putting the two photos together, I noticed a slight physical resemblance between the two writers. If I were inclined to follow Yukio Mishima's train of thought as shown in his tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility, I'd suspect O'Conner of being Kafka's reincarnation.

She was born nine months after Kafka's death.

A Tale of Two Barangay

In Philippines, cities and municipalities are subdivided into areas called barangays. For example, our house is located in the town of Sibulan - in Brgy. Magatas.

According to Wikipedia, there are 42,045 barangays in the country. As far as I know, each Barangay has a barangay Hall.

I would have thought that the barangay hall would actually be located within the particular barangay it represents. I know of at least one case where that isn't so.

As can be seen in these photos, the barangay halls for Brgy. Taclobo and Brgy.Poblacion 7 in Dumaguete are next door to one another. According to Google Maps, both are located within Brgy.Poblacion 7.

My Return

One week after the death of my PC the computer is back from the shop and I'm ready to blog again.

The PC wasn't in the shop the entire week - I didn't bring it in to Algorithm Computer Services until Wednesday afternoon. The problem involved the power supply. I suppose the frequent lose of power, due to brown-outs while the PC was running, was finally too much. The power supply was replaced. Total cost - including labor - was 1,170 pesos (about $22 at today's exchange rate).

The tech at Algorithm managed to save my files - documents and photos etc. However, I lost the saved passwords on my web browser. Fortunately, I had most of the passwords saved elsewhere. There's a minor glitch with the Kindle for PC, but I can live with it. The worst part of the whole thing is that I've lost the Spotify app I had on my PC. I can't download another onto my PC because my operating system is prehistoric. I can listen to Spotify on my phone but it is inferior to the old PC app I once had. I could improve my Spotify experience on my phone if I were willing to go "premium", which I'm not at this point.

While I was without my computer, I made use of my Kindle. A week or so ago, I came across "The Gracie Allen Murder Case" online and I enjoyed the film so much that I looked into the entire Philo Vance series. The 12 crime novels in the series are in the public domain in Canada and are available for download at Fadedpage.com. I had uploaded the first in the series, The Benson Murder Case to my Kindle with plans to put the other eleven in as well. After reading the first novel, I decided to wait before reading any more. I just wasn't as impressed as I thought I would be.

When I had finished reading The Benson Murder Case, I started on two others I had also downloaded from Fadedpage - Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away both by Flannery O'Connor.

I'll speak more about those two novels in another blog post.

Dead PC

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I was ever reluctant to see the death of blogging and as it turned out, I began to get back into the swing of things and actually started to post more frequently than I had been.

Just as the number of posts began to pick up for November, I was hit with something that looked as if it might push my blogging further toward it's demise. This past Saturday, after having watched "A Night at the Opera" on my PC, I left my computer turned on while I finished reading a novel I had uploaded to my Kindle. While reading, we experienced another of the never ending electrical brown-outs plaguing our area.

The electricity wasn't off long. I immediately restarted my PC. This was a mistake. It hadn't been on very long when we experienced a 2nd brown-out. This time my PC did something bizarre.

My desktop had completely changed. There was no desktop photo and most of the items I had on the desktop had vanished. I was able to get online, but it was as if my system had returned to day one. I had no documents - no photos.  Kindle for PC was gone as was Spotify. My browser had lost all my saved passwords.

Not everything disappeared. I still had my anti virus software installed and my GIMP photo editor was there. It looked as if all our photos from over the years were lost.

I was unable to download either a new Kindle For PC or Spotify app as my operating system was too out of date. I guess the ones I had before the crash were "grandfathered" in. The wisest thing for me to do, it seemed, was to try to restore the PC to an earlier point in time.

Now, after going to a restore point, my PC is denying me access. Strangely enough though, I can enter my PC in "safe mode" where I've located all my lost photos and documents which I've managed to transfer to a USB flash drive. With these photos saved, I feel much better about taking my PC in for repair. If it turns how that a new hard drive and OS is called for, I have the photos saved.

I'm writing this post on my son's laptop - which I hate using. Hopefully I can be back to normal in a few days.