"Our favored idea of the Kafkaesque is of a "labyrinthine bureaucracy." We think of thin corridors that lead only to doors that in turn lead to other doors. In fact, Kafka wrote very few scenes of this kind. What is bureaucratic and labyrinthine in The Trial is not the rooms in which Josef K. finds himself, nor even the people who obstruct him, but rather the infinite time it takes to get anywhere at all. What is labyrinthine, in Kafka, is time itself."
{Zadie Smith, "The Limited Circle Is Pure: Franz Kafka Versus the Novel," The New Republic, Nov 3, 2003}