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Somebody must have made a false accusation against me, for I was accused of not having read The Trial without having even raised the topic. I fixed up a brew, poked in a madeleine, and summoned up the liars of recall. I recalled my sixteen-year-old self, in his bedroom in his backwater home town, feasting on Vonnegut, Poe, and Kafka one miserable summer . . . then the liars spoke to me: “Are you merely inserting Kafka’s The Trial as a book you ought to have read during that summer of pain, when in actual fact . . . ?” I knew I had seen Orson Welles’s frenetic adaptation from the 60s, because I recall thinking: ‘I can’t remember this section from The Trial, I wonder what Welles invented.’ Because, perhaps, in actual fact, in spite of those proud teenage brags, I hadn’t actually read The Trial at all? I writhed in agony for two days, desperate to prise details of that first reading to appease my accusers. Then I simply checked out The Trial from the library and read the bastard. Quite possibly for the FIRST time. There we are. Masterpiece. Screw you, memory.