Kafkaesque: a word so overused it has lost all meaning?

Han Kang’s Man Booker International winner has prompted much use of the word – but do we really understand what it means?

On Monday night, Han Kang’s strange, disturbing, brilliant novel The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International prize. Shortly afterwards, dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster announced that searches for the word “Kafkaesque” had “spiked dramatically” in the wake of her win, because the novel “has been described by its British publishers (and by a number of reviewers) as Kafkaesque”.

Merriam-Webster is not wrong. The Vegetarian’s US publisher calls the novel “a darkly allegorical, Kafkaesque tale of power, obsession and one woman’s struggle to break free from the violence both without and within her”. I spoke to the chair of judges for the Man Booker International prize, Boyd Tonkin, about the novel, and he said that at times when reading it, “I was thinking of Kafka, because it’s about the change of state … part of the heroine’s protest is not getting rid of meat, but getting rid of her humanity, becoming a plant or a tree.”

Related: Translated fiction sells better in the UK than English fiction, research finds

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