It is said that TheCastle, while being an indisputably great book, seems pointless to read after a while. And I admit that, although I am officially reading it this week and am pretty delighted by it, I have not been driven to pick it up every day, as I recently was with The Goldfinch and The Son. It makes sense: Franz Kafka's story is one of incompletion, in which a man named K. (even his name is incomplete) arrives to a mysterious, unplace-able town dominated by an impregnable bureaucracy known as, of course, The Castle. A few pages in, it is painfully yet wonderfully clear that he is not going to reach his grail. Why should I finish the book if our hero’s hopes are to be brutally dashed?

All the more a reason to think about its beginning. In the beginnings, we usually find the ends. In fact, the first chapter is the only one from The Castle ever published by Franz Kafka. So let’s take a look at its first paragraph:

It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village, K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.

As the book goes on, the Castle above grows even more illusory and empty, and the gaze lasts a long time, but, oh, that gaze. That is the crux of it, this gaze peering into the mist and darkness. And what a great way to beckon us on to read and learn more.

The other beginning I’m thinking of this week is from our textbook, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. In “The School,” Donald Barthelme begins:

Well, we had all these children out planting trees, see, because we figured that . . . that was part of their education, to see how, you know, the root systems . . . and also the sense of responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the bet. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.

With Barthelme, as usual, I enjoy him too much to make critical sense. But it’s safe to say that we are meeting a man through his voice, we are hearing a story through a man. And though a man isn’t telling us about his day, his life, we are learning all sorts of important things about him.

This is especially a speaking voice, one that repeats itself a bit, that doesn’t quite end, and that is depressed by the death of trees but this depression, well, maybe . . . (it’s hard not to mimic the rhythm in part) maybe that’s not the most adult response to take to the blight. So we worry a little for the children, and wonder if he, their teacher presumably, knew anything about trees before handing out thirty of them. I at least am curious to read on, to see what other disasters follow at this poor school.