'The Trial and Metamorphosis are full of their own depth, and their own complicated sadness, but they don't strike the heart with the same poignancy as Kafka's final, unfathomable novel,' he wrote. Why should this be? Is it that the powers-that-be at the global search engine don't feel he has universal appeal, or that he's too weird and European for British readers? That conclusion would seem odd, as Kafka was a master at finding universal metaphors that have grown ever more powerful with time.Īnd why, anyway, has Google chosen Metamorphosis rather than The Castle or The Trial to represent the master? John Banville would probably have opted for the 'great and terrible novel of guilt, judgment and retribution', The Trial, while Guardian blogger William Burrows is not the only reader to believe that The Castle is Kafka at his most beautiful and most emotional.

This nightmarish image of the human-insect lodged in our imaginations is now a Google doodle marking the 130th anniversary of Kafka's birth on Jbut so far, in a machination worthy of the master himself, in almost all of the world except for the UK.