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The commute from Princeton to Manhattan at rush hourĬlarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. I present this list with my apologies to Franz.

That’s Kafkaesque.īut that’s no really excuse for the following list of things that have been called, at one time or another, “Kafkaesque”-from the deadly serious to the extremely silly, from the actually Kafkaesque to the merely annoying. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. For the record, in 1991, Kafka biographer Frederick R.

Others have noted how it is quite often misused. Many people have pointed out that the term “Kafkaesque” is grossly overused. So on the day of his death, I decided to grease (if only slightly) what really must be a constant spinning of his corpse in his grave by collating a number of things that we, as a societal group, have decided to count as “Kafkaesque.” He was one of my earliest literary obsessions-I even read Philip Roth’s The Breast, for him. Kafkaesque is a feeling that you are but a small component of this huge system which demands unnecessarily complicated paperwork for a simple thing or when you feel that you are overpowered by an authority. Today is the 95th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka.