Even more nightmarish than I remembered. Just the most brutal perversion of the quest narrative. People — including the protagonist — are unknowable shells: "this not very savoury assistant [...] this puppet which sometimes gave one the impression of not being properly alive." And they get treated as such — I'd forgotten about the "interrogations" which form the background to K's wanderings through the back rooms of the inn. At the center of it all, voracious like a black hole, a kind of generator of negativity, is that unassuageable self-persecuting sense of inadequacy, of feeling oneself

someone who rode roughshod over everything, both over the law and over the most ordinary human consideration, with this callous indifference and sleepiness, someone who simply did not care that he was making the distribution of the files almost impossible and damaging the reputation of the house and who brought about something that had never happened before, that the gentlemen, driven to desperation, had begun to defend themselves, and, after an overcoming of their own feelings unimaginable for ordinary people, had reached for the bell and called for help to expel this person on whom nothing else could make any impression!