I found out about Kobo Abe from watching Tim Rogers videos on YouTube. I love that guy's videos, and if you like video games you should definitely check him out. Thanks Tim.
The Woman in the Dunes was an extremely striking and emotionally moving story about a man who becomes stuck in a literal pit. Although the symbolism might seem a bit obvious, Abe's exploration of life in a sand pit reached down inside of me and stirred up feelings that I did not want to feel. This book made me feel nervous, paranoid, and had me sitting up deep into the night feeling that I had to abruptly escape from society and start a new life in the woods with nothing. I'm not exaggerating that, either, I was really sitting in my bathroom last night feeling an immense sense of dread about my growing integration with urban lifestyles and desiring immediate escape from its grinding pressure and unbearable weight. This is one of the best books that I have read this year, and I thoroughly recommend it.
By one analysis, Dunes is just a retelling of the Sisyphus myth, and perhaps that is the ultimate substructure which gives this work its weight. Who can admit to never having felt that life is just an endless grind, whether spent at the office or whether spent shoveling sand out of a pit? Yet, Abe's version of this myth is more than just a stylized transformation of the classic "it's all for naught" doomerism bouncing around for the past thousands of years. This novel is the story of a man who tries to escape from the sand, who tries to throw off the rock in daring and spit in the face of obligation.
The story telling in this work is phenomenal, as we watch the protagonist's mental state shifting, dealing with his conception of life within and beyond the pit. In the beginning of the novel, our hero is living a lifeless life in the city, married to a nameless woman, working with a "mobius strip man". His effort to study entomology and one day have his name marked down in an entomology book is the only notable interest in his life, and the author openly mocks him for this. While wandering out into the desert, the man encounters strangers who force him into a pit from which he cannot escape. There is a house at the bottom of this pit, and a woman lives inside.
Abe's decision to blossom his narrative at the bottom of this pit is