Kafka writes, for instance, of officials who revel in their despotic power over petitioners, 'against their own will [loving] the scent of wild game like that'. Though he was the least ideological of writers, Kafka had an acute feel for the obscene intimacies of power. Hinted at in his striking metaphor [The Castle] is a bestial, predatory appetite in the officials, sometimes submerged, sometimes baring itself.

-- J.M. Coetzee, "Translating Kafka"