Kōbō Abe

The Woman in the Dunes

chiara

What in heaven's name was the real essence of this beauty? Was it the precision of nature with its physical laws, or was it nature's mercilessness, ceaselessly resisting man's understanding?

Beautiful scenery need not be sympathetic to man. His own viewpoint in considering the sand to be a rejection of the stationary state was no madness... a 1/8mm flow... a world where existence was a series of states. The beauty of sand, in other words, belonged to death. It was the beauty of death that ran through the magnificence of its ruins and its great power of destruction.

How dark it was. The whole world had closed its eyes and stopped its ears.

I didn't understand. But life isn't something one can understand, I suppose. There are all kinds of life, and sometimes the other side of the hill looks greener. What's hardest for me is not knowing what living like this will ever come to. But obviously you can never know, no matter what sort of life you live. Somehow I can't help but feel it would be better to have a little more to keep busy with.

Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion. 

And so, one bit one's nails, unable to find contentment in the simple beating of one's heart... one smoked, unable to be satisfied with the rhythm of one's brain... one had the shakes, unable to find satisfaction in sex alone. Breathing, walking, bowel movements, daily schedules, Sunday coming every seven days, final exams after every four months, far from quieting him, had had the effect rather of pushing him toward a new repetition of them.

Kobo Abe

The inhabitants of a remote seaside village imprison a Japanese biologist in a deep sand pit

Un chef d'oeuvre, étrange et profondément original. Un entomologiste japonais à la poursuite d'une mouche rare qui ferait sa renommée, se perd dans des dunes et demande l'hospitalité à des villageois un peu frustes, qui le logent chez une femme seule vivant au fond d'un trou de sable, dans une cabane menaçant de s'effondrer. Le touriste s'aperçoit avec effroi que l'échelle de corde a disparu le lendemain. Il tentera par maints stratagèmes de s'enfuir mais n'y parviendra jamais. il devra, avec cette femme à la fois attirante et répugnante, récolter le sable indéfiniment... 

Hamonic

Deep dive into human psychology from different angles. The limited characters show many sides of humanity, without giving a picture of good and evil. 

J Fra

i started this last year on a janky pdf on my phone so i wasn't really engaged at first. i kept putting it off but i wrapped up the last third after finding a better version and wow i actually ended up loving this so much... i love the precise and empirical details, man's attempt at knowing the unknown and holding on to rationality in the face of irrationality. i love the measurements (1/8 mm appears often), how visceral the descriptions were (good use of all 5 senses), the explanations of national phenomena, and imagining the contraptions and devices in my head. also just such a perfect surreal allegory i don't know how abe thought of this. 

i think it's also worth exploring why it's called 'the woman in the dunes', like the arrangement where he's guaranteed intimacy with another person and the conception of this kind of relationship + the role of mothers / women & nuclear families in an unsteady, alienated world. the web of exploitation abe creates is intricate and meticulous with an amazing atmosphere of absurdity sustained by the sublime, temperamental natural world. the woman becomes the focal point because she is the only source of intimacy and connection near him... eerie.

i started this last year on a janky pdf on my phone so i wasn't really engaged at first. i kept putting it off but i wrapped up the last third after finding a better version and wow i actually ended up loving this so much... i love the precise and empirical details, man's attempt at knowing the unknown and holding on to rationality in the face of irrationality. i love the measurements (1/8 mm appears often), how visceral the descriptions were (good use of all 5 senses), the explanations of national phenomena, and imagining the contraptions and devices in my head. also just such a perfect surreal allegory i don't know how abe thought of this. 

i think it's also worth exploring why it's called 'the woman in the dunes', like the arrangement where he's guaranteed intimacy with another person and the conception of this kind of relationship + the role of mothers / women & nuclear families in an unsteady, alienated world. the web of exploitation abe creates is intricate and meticulous with an amazing atmosphere of absurdity sustained by the sublime, temperamental natural world. the woman becomes the focal point because she is the only source of intimacy and connection near him... eerie.

amari

a good example of commentary done well. won’t say what it’s commenting on tho

Stuffy, visceral, and claustrophobic. I felt like getting a car sickness throughout, kek engep gitu, mual. The combination with magical realism was mystifying. The story itself was kind of an accessory to the atmosphere-setting game. It's been years since I've read the book but even just looking at the title draws me back to that scorching hot sandy dusty cavity. Seriously, won't this book let me go??? But anw, this is a good one precisely for how powerfully nauseating it was.

A leitura é /tão/ chata, e a história não é tão impressionante o quanto promete.

remiel

altlovesbooks

This is one of those books that has a misleading premise and misleading Goodreads tags. I am not into philosophy, existentialism, or asshole protagonists(? Did this book even have a protagonist?), and yet that's essentially all there is here. If any of my friends added this book to their TBR list based on Goodreads' writeup specifically, remove it. You won't like it.

So the main character is an unlikable entomologist whose trip to the seaside to find some sort of sand beetle goes terribly awry when he gets himself captured by a sand press gang. This village, beset by mountains of sand dunes on all sides, has to resort to coercion to keep enough people to shovel the sand away on a daily basis. Weirdly enough, villagers leave and don't come back, so anyone unlucky enough to wander remotely close gets stuck here. The main character's companion during this is a woman who clearly has been there for some time, drunk the sand kool-aid, and is basically this passive presence in the story who doesn't seem to ever want to leave. And, scene.

Really, not a lot, magical realism or otherwise, happens. The man attempts escape a few times, has increasingly violent outbursts against the woman, and even seems to force himself on her a few times. This was not a fun book to read, by any means.

Clearly there's something intellectual going on under the hood based on other people's experiences here, but I can only rate based on my own enjoyment and I did not enjoy this book. Short as it is, I still had to basically force myself to finish it.

The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel. After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman. Together their fates become intertwined as they work side by side at this Sisyphean task.

Angus Bretherick

B.H. Pitt

haunting and claustrophobic--the nightmare of finding yourself a bug trapped in a jar.

Omar

At times I grew restless reading this book. Likely due to growing tiredness of the situation the main character found himself in. Abe's genius is probably reflected on just how extensively I felt for the plight of the main character. 

"Loneliness was an unsatisfied thirst for illusion."