A century after his death, Kafka still sums up our surreal world | Rachel Cooke

A sneak preview of a new exhibition about him sends shivers down my spine

Tomorrow, it will be 100 years since the writer Franz Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna from tuberculosis – and the good news is that as major literary anniversaries go, this one is easy to mark. You could, for instance, simply read him: a short story, perhaps, or a few pages of Ross Benjamin’s new, uncensored translation of his diaries. If you’re in Oxford, where his papers are in the Bodleian Library, you can see a new exhibition about him, and gawp at his sputum jar and a syringe of the type with which those treating him used to inject cocaine directly into his larynx; you might also wander in the city’s University Parks, where a giant inflatable “Jitterbug” – like Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, it is half man and half insect – has appeared, as if from outer space.

Or you could just go about your regular life, and wait for the K-word – Kafkaesque – to float, unbidden, into your mind. The newspapers or the BBC will probably deliver at breakfast time, but if for some reason they don’t, there must be a bill you need to query, some kind of rebate you’re owed. Personally, I find that battling with the council over its stupid exercises in confirmation bias – questionnaires about low-traffic zones that permit only one “correct” answer – is good for reaffirming my sense that faceless, slightly sinister bureaucracy is indeed all around. But there are also a growing number of friends I can text, the better to find out how their David-and-Goliath office struggles are going. Oh, the glorious word soup that spouts endlessly from the mouths of HR departments!

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