Vit Babenco's Reviews > Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is an absurdist dystopia…
The beginning of the novel brings to memory The Castle by Franz Kafka…

…I couldn’t seem to find the right room – none of them had the number designated on my pass. First I wound up at the Department of Verification, then the Department of Misinformation, then some clerk from the Pressure Section advised me to try level eight, but on level eight they ignored me, and later I got stuck in a crowd of military personnel – the corridors rang with their vigorous marching back and forth, the slamming of doors, the clicking of heels, and over that martial noise I could hear the distant music of bells, the tinkling of medals.

However the chronicler finds the Commander in Chief soon enough… And instead of the castle he enters the headquarters of the Cosmic Command… Which is also a vehicle of the cosmic bureaucracy…

I had suspected for some time now that the Cosmic Command, obviously no longer able to supervise every assignment on an individual basis when there were literally trillions of matters in its charge, had switched over to a random system. The assumption would be that every document, circulating endlessly from desk to desk, must eventually hit upon the right one.

At once he is assigned to the special most secret mission… But he doesn’t know what mission it is… And nobody can tell him… Spies and counterspies, agents and counteragents are everywhere…

An endless white labyrinth lay in wait out there, I knew, and an equally endless wandering. The net of corridors, halls and soundproof rooms, each ready to swallow me up…

He starts roaming the maze… He can enter any door… But everywhere he finds nothing but absurd dead ends… The inanimate bureaucratic system attempts to destroy any individuality…

“Only a worm can play the worm…”

The webs of red tape are no less dangerous than a pernicious quagmire.