I recently reread the first few chapters of The Castle and was surprised find such a different novel than what I remembered as a teenager: it was funny.
My German is better now than when I first attempted the novel, but when I was younger I took everything so much more earnestly that I was immune to the humor. I think it was mainly that I regarded irony as a complaint, rather than a punch line.
from my experience with the C++ API, including debugging problems until I find that they were indeed issues that eventually got fixed upstream, the API is poor and any combination of functions that were not explicitly tested is likely to not work correctly and trip you up.
I wonder if naming the project after him was actually a disservice - previously pretty disambiguous name now leads many people to think of a software project.
OTOH, he might be shocked (and perhaps even displeased), what a cultural icon he became after his death.
I was a big Kafka fan in my younger years. Having read Metamorphosis multiple times, its depth became shallower everytime I've read it. Today, I don't know what to make of his writings.
My German is better now than when I first attempted the novel, but when I was younger I took everything so much more earnestly that I was immune to the humor. I think it was mainly that I regarded irony as a complaint, rather than a punch line.