Word of the Day!

Kafkaesque [kahf-kuh-esk]

adjective:
1 of, relating to, or suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings
2 having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality


Examples:

And yet to choose the right one, shoppers must navigate a Kafkaesque maze. (Steven Kurutz, Mattress shopping can be confusing, Herald-Tribune, October 2014)

In fact, to survive in this system, one has to be an expert in camouflaging and hiding from the system. So, let’s dive deeper into this Kafkaesque process, in which the aim is not to learn how to avoid bureaucracy but how people manage to get bureaucracy done. (Amna Hashmi, The rise of bureaucratic cartels, The Express Tribune, June 2024)

For some reason this has less a distancing effect than one of increased intimacy. It's one of the rules of his Kafkaesque game of alienation with the reader; almost as if he's daring us to become involved, or to resist becoming involved. (M John Harrison, Posthumous Stories by David Rose - review, The Guardian, December 2013)

Even at their most whimsical, in some ways, the film's magical realist touches aren't far off from the reality of the US immigration system, where Kafkaesque absurdities abound. (Catherine E Shoichet, This veteran actor plays an immigration lawyer in a new movie. In real life he's fighting his own case, CNN, March 2024)

It is a Kafkaesque, sealed universe in which nothing is, as it appears to be. (Sam Vaknin, After the Rain)

Origin:

1947, resembling such situations as are explored in the fiction of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), German-speaking Jewish novelist born in Prague, Austria-Hungary. The surname is Czech German, literally 'jackdaw,' and is imitative. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a Czech-born German-language writer whose surreal fiction vividly expressed the anxiety, alienation, and powerlessness of the individual in the 20th century. The opening sentence of his 1915 story 'The Metamorphosis' has become one of the most famous in Western literature (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”), while in his novel The Trial, published a year after his death, a young man finds himself caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law after being charged with a crime that is never named. So deft was Kafka’s prose at detailing nightmarish settings in which characters are crushed by nonsensical, blind authority, that writers began using his name as an adjective a mere 16 years after his death. Although many other literary eponyms, from Austenian to Homeric, exist and are common enough, Kafkaesque gets employed more than most and in a wide variety of contexts, leading to occasional charges that the word has been watered down and given a lack of specificity due to overuse. (Merriam-Webster)