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.”

The dictionary defines the adjective, incidentally, as “of, relating to, or suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings; especially: having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality”. Nightmarish and illogical is also what I’d have taken from a description of something as Kafkaesque, with an insectile undercurrent beneath it all (I don’t think that last bit is right, incidentally, but it’s what the word makes me think of).

But Merriam-Webster also admits that the word, which saw its first recorded use in English in 1946, “is so overused that it’s begun to lose its meaning”, a word that a columnist for Toronto’s Globe and Mail argued is “tossed around with cavalier imprecision, applied to everything from an annoying encounter with a petty bureaucrat to the genocidal horrors of the Third Reich”.

Kafka is not the only author to lend his name to an adjective - Merriam-Webster also points to Dickensian and Byronic, but there are many. Proustian. Joycean. Miltonic. Chaucerian. Pinteresque. Woolfian. Faulknerian.

Perhaps almost as abused as Kafkaesque is Orwellian. The OED defines it as “characteristic of Orwell’s writings, esp. the totalitarian state in his dystopian account of the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four”. But the New York Times says its use “reduces Orwell’s palette to a single shade of noir. It brings to mind only sordid regimes of surveillance and thought control and the distortions of language that make them possible”, while an excellent Daily Mash article argues that the word has “nothing to do with having to put your recycling out” and that “similarly, speed cameras are not ‘Orwellian’”, because “Winston Smith does not spend Nineteen Eighty-Four trying to weasel out of a £75 fine for doing 70 on the A12”.

But back to The Vegetarian, and how Kafkaesque it is, whatever that actually means to us. Tonkin also compared the novel to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and to The Bell Jar and The Yellow Wallpaper, making it, I suppose, Ovidian, Plathian, and Perkins Gilmanesque, as well (although I’m not sure if that’ll make it into the blurb). But aside from the misuse and overuse of Kafkaesque, there’s something rather nice about the fact that enough people were interested in the winner of a literary award for translated fiction that a sizeable crowd took the trouble to look it up. Perhaps this means that the growth in translated fiction over the last 15 years, revealed last week by the Man Booker International prize, is set to continue. Let’s hope so.