List $54.98

Written by Franz Kafka - Translation by David Whiting - Audio book performed by Rupert Degas - Unabridged Fiction - 7 COMPACT DISCS - 8 hours, 21 minutes

Publisher, Naxos Audiobooks (August 2007)

Listen to an MP3 audio clip.

The Trial is one of the great works of the twentieth century: an extraordinary vision of one man put on trial by an anonymous authority on an unspecified charge.

Josef K, 30, lives in a large town in an unspecified country. He is summonsed to answer a charge and appears in the court room for his trial. Franz Kafka evokes all the reality of trial without any of the specifics in a society that seems to have degraded into chaos: squalid environment, rats, yellow liquid shooting out of a hole in the wall. Guards, claustrophobia, anxiety – this is a gripping story and an allegory of modern life. This text remains just as relevant a century after it was written.

Franz Kafka was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague in 1883 and died there in 1924. Though trained in law, he was an insurance clerk for 14 years and wrote in his spare time in German, though he had a good command of Czech (his family name means Jackdaw). Kafka had an ambivalent attitude towards his home town – he once described Prague as a ‘a little mother with claws’ – but it was there that he wrote his three major novels, America, The Trial and The Castle, as well as the shorter fiction, including his most widely-read story, Metamorphosis.

The Translation - For this unabridged recording of The Trial, we commissioned a new translation from David Whiting, a retired teacher who has made Kafka a particular study. He will shortly embark upon a new translation of The Castle – once he has finished translating a new and definitive biography of the Waltz King Johann Strauss for Naxos Books!

The Recording - Naxos AudioBooks publisher Nicolas Soames comments: ‘Rupert Degas was the ideal reader for The Trial. Kafka was in his 30s when he wrote it, and that was the age of reader we were looking for. And then, of course, there is the Murakami Connection! Rupert has now given us three outstanding recordings of novels by Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase and (to be released in October 2007) Dance Dance Dance.

Murakami cites Kafka as one of his main influences and you can see and feel it in all his work. Rupert excels in this odd reality – it all seems normal but abnormal things happen – and the sense of human dislocation which pervades both Murakami and Kafka.

And yet, Rupert himself is nothing like that! He is tremendously outgoing and spontaneous. A remarkable talent, much in demand for cartoon voice-overs because he can do anything with his voice, he throws himself into his readings, acting out the characters and the situation with his hands and body (despite the discipline required by audio recording which picks up any sound and movement!)

He admits himself that The Trial was, for him, a bit of a trial! ‘The work needed a very different approach from Murakami – more restrained and held-back, as Joseph K tries to make sense of the odd, unreal situation in which he finds himself,’ says Rupert. Such continuous restraint doesn’t come easily to the ebullient Rupert Degas, partly perhaps because while he was recording The Trial he was starring in London’s West End in a particularly vivacious production of John Buchan’s The 39 Steps.

And it was with some relief that he turned to his next Naxos AudioBooks recording: Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance!