Franz Kafka’s The Trial seems straightforward enough as you read it, and yet the words don’t quite seem to take you anywhere. There’s an effect in the novel of dense nothingness: Kafka’s brilliance was for a pared-down prose with complex resonances that deliberately strand the reader. In a 1998 English translation issued by Schocken Books Inc., the translator in his preface discusses the thorniness of recreating in English from German how the word “assault” is used in various tenses to link the protagonist’s slander, his arrest, and his relationship to a typist. One could spend years attempting to parse the bottomless intricacies of The Trial, and people have. Kafka achieved a prose that deconstructs the convoluted legalese that societies adapt in an effort to divorce situations from common sense and decency via labyrinths of language, and thus controlling the populace.

Orson Welles is a counterintuitive fit for The Trial,...