The Trial by node

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K. is arrested in his boarding house by two agents of an unnamed court. They will not tell him the charge. From that moment he is drawn into a legal labyrinth that operates in tenement attics and dingy back offices, governed by rules that cannot be learned and procedures that cannot be followed. Kafka's novel traces one man's frantic, futile effort to mount a defence against a system that may not even require his guilt to destroy him.