Stark black, white and gray in sharply etched, near-Expressionist strokes is a fine way to represent Kafka in a graphic novel. Author David Zane Mairowitz trimmed The Castle to fit the graphic novel format of word balloons and captions while artist Jaromír 99 illustrated the text. The story, as rendered here, is disturbingly redolent of a society ordered by rules no one understands. As Mairowitz says in his introduction, The Castle’s usual interpretation as “depicting a blind, totalitarian bureaucracy casting an iron grip” on the village outside the walled redoubt is only one lane in Kafka’s labyrinth of alienation.
