安部公房

Kobo Abe

Kōbō Abe

David

In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where they are pressed into shovelling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village.

The Woman in the Dunes

I loved the beginning - lyrical prose, whimsical, humorous, nerdy, it made me think I'd love this book. And it clearly is of great literary merit, I'm not denying its artistic value. It's really deep, has powerful symbolism and opens up further when studied in depth. BUT on Goodreads, my rating reflects my personal enjoyment, and this one was pretty arduous to read, felt very claustrophobic (which I didn't really enjoy while staying in quarantine myself), the characters were far from likable (although I did empathize with them) and it was very, very bleak. 

The full misery of human existence, unvarnished. But without the love, the possibility of greatness, of heart-breaking beauty, that gives meaning to suffering. There is a glimmer of the emergence of kindness and love at the end, but it remains pretty painful and bleak anyway. 

So, if you're the literary kind of reader who likes hard-hitting, powerful allegories about human life, you'll probably really like this. It just wasn't really for me at the moment.

Gustina Jaraite

"There wasn't a single item of importance. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes...And so everybody knowing the meaningless of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home". The novel isn't about sand anyway. "Are you shoveling to survive, or surviving to shovel?” the man asks the woman, and who cannot ask the same question? "The Woman in the Dunes” felt like a modern version of the myth of Sisyphus, instead of a man condemned by the gods to spend eternity rolling a boulder to the top of a hill, only to see it roll back down, we have sand. Always the sand.