by Franz Kafka (1922 AD)
The Castle is the story of a landsurveyor, K., who comes to a village on a supposed commission from the town’s castle, only to slowly, tediously, and ceaselessly bang his head against the fact that there is no reason for his being there at all. At book that feels at once the opposite as well as the twin of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the absurdity of The Castle is heightened by the fact that K, in the opening pages, literally awakes to it, finding himself in an all-consuming bureaucratic nightmare that “thus pampered and enervated him, ruled out all possibility of conflict, and transposed him to an unofficial, totally unrecognized, troubled, and alien existence.”