Saturday, March 8, 2014

Twelve books that end mid-sentence

Gabe Habash named twelve books that end mid-sentence for PWxyz, the news blog of Publishers Weekly, including:
The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926)

The Ending:
She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said
Why: Kafka died. There’s some debate about whether he would’ve even finished The Castle had he not died of tuberculosis–in a 1922 letter to his friend and executor Max Brod, he stated he was giving up on it. But Kafka also told Brod on multiple occasions that the ending would involve K. living and eventually dying in the village, culminating on K.’s death bed as he receives a notice from the castle that his “legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there.”
Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue