It was the early 1970s and I was a student at the University of York. I was 20. I wore a beard (ill-advised), a donkey jacket (pretentious) and I was in love. The object of my affections was my tutorial partner. She was blonde, wore floaty dresses (like Stevie Nicks from Fairport Convention) and spoke with a lovely West Country burr, writes Carlo Gébler
As our tutorials were Tuesdays at two, we'd always have lunch together beforehand. One day, as we queued at the servery of the college cafeteria, we fell in behind a student in a beret with a hardback edition of Martin Amis's first novel, The Rachel Papers, on his tray.
"Worth reading?" Sarah asked him. He was a linguistics post-grad and couldn't comment on the content but he had a lot to say about Amis's transitive verbs, all of which he'd counted.
I got my food and sloped off. Sarah followed two minutes later. "He looked interesting," I said, not meaning it. "From linguistics, interesting? Are you mad? They're worse than the bio-chemists." We laughed, and she added ruefully, "I've only myself to blame, of course. I see someone with an interesting book, I can't help asking about it. I've met all my boyfriends that way." I'd heard about attracting girls with interesting books, but I'd never had it confirmed. Well, now I had.
The following Tuesday I had Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was a good beginning. I followed with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (she loved my account), The Rachel Papers (too nasty for her tastes, it transpired) and then Samuel Beckett's Molloy. Bad idea, this did not impress - or at least my report did not: too gloomy, too depressing, she thought. I was crushed.
"I don't want a book that just tells me how awful life is," she said. "I want a book that makes sense of the world."
I went straight to the University Bookshop. Kerouac had been the high point since when, little progress. But now I had new intelligence: where was the book that wasn't about just the awfulness of life, but that explained the world?
I gravitated to books in translation - a book from abroad would surely do the trick. And there I spotted it. The following Tuesday when we sat down to lunch, I set it down in front of us, cover up naturally.
"Oh, The Trial," she said. This edition had a picture of Kafka on the front. "You look a bit like him, you know." I had a beard and he didn't, but I wasn't going to argue.
In our post-tutorial conversation, which extended from tea through dinner and on into the small hours, and included two bottles of Hirondelle and some Lebanese red, I made my pitch. If we wanted to understand the 20th century and all its miseries - the Holocaust, Fascism, Stalinism, totalitarianism, state violence, colonialism, imperialism, consumer capitalism, Maoism and anything else you cared to add to the list so long as it was bad, then The Trial was your book and Kafka was your man. Moreover, The Trial was written before most of what went wrong that century had happened. So Kafka was clairvoyant as well as accurate.
Thirty years on, I have just re-read The Trial. It has been a chastening experience. It is never nice to remember the nonsense one talked but in this case the idiocy seems of higher order. It seems wilful. It wasn't just that I was wrong headed: I said what I said in defiance of the evidence provided by a text I had actually read.
Firstly, which I completely ignored, The Trial is a comedy, and secondly, an even bigger solipsism this, it is emphatically not about what I said. I should have known this because the author very thoughtfully announced the subject on the cover. It's called The Trial for the excellent reason that that is what it is about: it is about a legal process, and the travails of the accused, K, as he is tried. Kafka's legal system may not be realistic, but it is a marvellous construction with its own worked-out logic, perfect according to its own terms in every detail. If The Trial were a watch it would have a Swiss mechanism and it would keep perfect time.
Perhaps if I'd said this then, I might have got what I wanted, instead of which, I was sent on my way with a peck on my cheek, friendly but not in the slightest bit amorous. Oh, if only. But then that's the trouble with life. We live it forwards; we understand it backwards.
Carlo Gébler is a writer. Adolf Gébler, Clarinettist, an opera for which he wrote the text, with music by Roger Doyle, will receive its premier in a lunchtime concert at the NCH next Tuesday.
Róisín Ingle is on leave