The Trial – Franz Kafka

I would have never thought I would have actually thoroughly enjoyed a book by Kafka. Extracts from his Metamorphosis were just too absurd and paranoid for me.

Yet, I loved reading The Trial, probably because Josef K. Seems to take everything well (I wouldn’t exactly say light-heartedly, but at least he seems to remain optimistic for most of the novel). Despite its theme and its ending, the novel is really not as grim as I expected it to be. Pleasantly surprised, I read this book in a quiet evening. And by the end of it, much to my delighted surprise, I didn’t even feel like a cockroach.

The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster

Countless critics and readers consider this to be Auster’s best book. For me, however, there are a few issues. For starters, I’m not too fond of the format: the three stories are too long to be considered short stories, but they are way too short for anyone to even think of splitting them into three separate books now (although they were originally published as such), so what we end up is, in my opinion, a somewhat unhappy mixture. In most of his books set in New York, Auster paints a beautiful picture of a city that is so unequivocally New York-esque – I have the feeling he doesn’t capture the same magic in this book, which ironically has the city’s name in its title (to me, the stories could be set pretty much anywhere in the US). Lastly, I find the alienation of the characters to simply be a bit too much – I wish at least some of them would act rationally and not lose their mind...

The book, however, does have a huge plus for me: it is where Auster has put in written form so many of the wonderful anecdotes shared by Harvey Keitel and William Hurt in Smoke, the movie for which he wrote one of the greatest scripts of the last 30 years.