kafkaesque

Kafkaesque describes situations that are nightmarishly complex, illogical, or oppressively bureaucratic—evoking the fiction of Franz Kafka, whose characters face absurd systems they cannot understand or escape.

A kafkaesque experience involves helpless confusion before impersonal authority: Trying to get my passport renewed was kafkaesque—I was sent to five different offices, each claiming the others were responsible.

The lowercase form is less common than capitalized. (Capitalized Kafkaesque is standard.)