“A book,” a 20-year-old Franz Kafka wrote to his friend Oskar Pollack in 1904, “must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” It is a quintessential Kafka image. I see an ice-axe, the sharpened point of its curved metal head shattering a vast plane of ice into hairline curves that ramify in all directions.

This kind of blow, this shattering of the surface of the world, produced one the greatest novels ever written, The Trial, and introduced to literature one of its most compelling characters, Joseph K., a senior bank clerk doomed to a tragic fate.

In its opening sentences, the novel’s premise is established with lightning speed. One workday morning, K. wakes up to find two strange men in his bedroom, who inexplicably place him under arrest. Later, he is sentenced to death for a crime he knows nothing about by a judge he never sees.

One hundred years after its publication on April 26, 1925, the blow of that axe is still being felt. The feeling it engenders is crystallised in a single adjective: “Kafkaesque”. It is a modifier that has become as famous as Kafka himself.

The Trial was written over the period 1914-15, when Kafka was in his early 30s. Like his two other novels – Amerika (alternatively known as The Man Who Disappeared) and The Castle – it was never finished. Kafka was a perfectionist who, as his diaries reveal, struggled with his artistic self-worth. He published little in his lifetime: two short story collections, some story extracts, and his novella The Metamorphosis, which went largely unnoticed.

We would not even have the novels if not for the intervention of Kafka'a close friend and literary executor Max Brod. Thankfully, Brod ignored Kafka’s instructions to destroy his manuscripts after his untimely death from tuberculosis at the age of 40 in 1924. The Trial was the first of the novels to be published posthumously, with the others appearing soon after.

Fellow Czech writer Milan Kundera, whose youth was shaped by Stalinist communism, characterised the Kafkaesque as a state of powerlessness when trapped inside a boundless labyrinth. He also saw in it an inversion of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. No longer is a crime met with a punishment; rather, the punishment goes in search of a crime.........

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