Review: From the heart of bureaucratic darkness, Patrice Martin’s brief homage to Kafka proves most entertaining

The phone rang and rang. The journalist, R., puzzled by the lack of response, scratched his head; just as he was about to hang up, a voice answered: “Whom are you seeking?”

R. had been down this road before – so before the Voice put him on hold, he blurted, “I’m looking for Patrice Martin.”

The Voice answered: “He’s not at this number, let me send you to his secretary.”

“Nooooo,” the journalist said, “I was just talking to him …” Can’t you just help me, R. thought to himself. It was, he said upon reflection, a Kafka-esque moment.

Fitting, perhaps, for an interview about a book called Kafka’s Hat by a bureaucrat-turned-Gatineau-alderman with a passion for the labyrinthine works of the sombre Czech, and the equally complex Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, Italian Italo Calvino, and American Paul Auster.

Kafka’s Hat is the English version of Martin’s brief (131 pages) but carefully crafted homage, which was first published in French in 2008 by Éditions XYZ. It has taken more than a few years to be translated and published by Talonbooks. But the germ of the book is a few years older even than that.

The story begins simply. A young employee, P., is summoned to the boss’s office and asked to pick up a prized purchase – a hat belonging to Franz Kafka. The journey, which should have been so simple, becomes a twisting and turning path that bedevils P. and forces him to battle an elevator, hide a dead body, ransack a filing cabinet, steal a hat — all the while with a vague foreboding following his every move.

“I had written articles and essays for the papers, but at some point I became more of a reader of fiction,” Martin says. That new passion prompted him. “I decided to see if I could do it.” So he started exploring fiction by writing a couple of small works. This intellectual exercise would become a published novel. He doesn’t really know how it all happened. Much like a Kafka novel, Martin was swept along in the process of writing, opening one door after the other and finding at the end of it all a book.

“I don’t know that one can ever really know what takes you in one direction and not another one. I don’t know how the image of Kafka’s hat came to me, but once I had that idea, everything followed.”

The very name “Kafka” is a powerful literary device, Martin says. “The word ‘Kafka’ is so charged with meaning that even without having read him, you know what a Kafka story will be like. It has to do with a world view, a certain sense of humour and a certain distance. It has to do with a certain alienation.”

Martin’s career path has taken him into the very heart of bureaucracy.

Before he became the chairman of Gatineau’s transit commission and before he became the alderman for Wright-Parc-de-la-Montagne in the 2005 election, he was the clerk of a couple of House of Commons committees and the secretary of the Canadian Section of the Inter-Parliamentary Forum of the Americas (FIPA). Before that he was a student at the University of Ottawa studying Italian and Political Theory. (He speaks four languages: Italian, French, English and Spanish. And he says he rides the bus.)

“I would say that we all deal with bureaucracies, whether we try to get a plane ticket reimbursed or a phone bill cancelled. What I like about Kafka is that he embodies this ridiculousness of trying to figure out … the system. You know there is probably a logic in the system, but damn if you can figure it out.”

And then Martin cites Max Weber, the German thinker and philosopher credited with helping found the discipline of sociology.

For Weber, bureaucracy was the price society paid for modernity, Martin says. And with that we are off on a philosophical discussion that sounds very much like it is from another age – a time when Marxism was discussed in the main stream like when I was in university in the early 1970s – and words like “alienation” were the subject of much thought. Not surprising that we would explore this, considering that Martin’s master’s thesis was on Herbert Marcuse, the German-born American New Left thinker and author, most famously, of One-Dimensional Man.

In the end, we have faith in bureaucracy and its ability to work as intended. When the machine does not work, we can lose control of our lives, Martin says, and also the place a novelist finds a story. And that, in Martin’s opinion, means thinking about the concept of alienation is even more relevant today in our technology-obsessed world.

His colleagues, current and past, have read the book and enjoyed it, and Martin is clearly pleased with that. His bottom line is that he wants to entertain the reader, from the mayor of Gatineau to the humble clerk.

He is considering another stab at a book, this time a collection of short stories, but his day job does get in the way. However, that could change between now and next November when he will decide whether to run in the municipal election.

Reprinted with permission from the author. Read the review as it was originally published here .