Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.69 AVERAGE
3.69 AVERAGE
It felt like a story that could have been interesting if told in a different manner, but i guess that was the author's purpose. The story drifts along, stretches out, but not much happens. I didn't like the protagonist, but that is no reason not to like the story. I didn't see the need to include the sexual violence scenes. All in all it's a creepy story about not a whole lot. The vibe is reminiscent of those avant garde films where you're struggling to figure out the symbolism and storyline. I felt like putting it down halfway but managed to struggle through the last half.
A fairly short and entertaining read, but up until the very end, whenever I read this book I became physically parched. The Woman in the Dunes is an existential novel that caused me to reflect on my work / life balance and my career aspirations in a the-grass-is-always-greener sort of way. When the plot slowed, the dystopian, surrealist world-building of the house in the sandpit, the town and it's sand-exporting slaver residents kept me interested. If you don't take anything away from this book, you will at least have a better understanding of the physical properties of sand.
challenging
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was a weird wild journey that was so claustrophobic I felt like I was stuck in this sand dune of a story. The ending made me absolutely dumbfounded.
dark
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe reminds me of Darren Aronofsky's latest film, mother! Both are artistic creations about a thing rather than a particular narrative. That is to say, both works are supposed to represent things that are incongruent to what you see on screen. A man is not just a man, a woman is not just a woman, a house is not just a house, etc — you get the idea.
The problem with works like these is that once you figure out what the different elements are supposed to represent, then there really isn't anything else for you to chew on. Early on in this book, I figured that the sand is supposed to represent time; the way time builds up and erodes everything; how you can never keep time at bay no matter how hard you try. Time is the great equaliser in nature, clearing away both the good and the bad. Time rules all.
You can also interpret the sand — or the sand dunes in particular — as pressures from others. Especially in a country like Japan, people have many different expectations of the roles you need to play to function as an individual in the society. And expectations can come in many forms, from that of a husband to that of an employee, etc. The dunes, then, represent these roles that we have to play, and there is no escaping no matter how hard you try. The protagonist's acceptance of his place in the village is also indicative of the dunes' symbolism as societal roles we all have to play.
With that said, once you have all of those figured out, and it is not hard to do so early on in the book, the rest of the book involves the characters going through the motion. Even though it is a relatively short book, it still took me quite some time to finish, especially when the centre portion of the book started to drag its feet. And just like how many Japanese authors — or books translated from Japanese — have this stiff, stilted way of writing, that is the case for The Woman in the Dunes also. The result is a narrative that never quite comes alive on the pages. None of the thrills and horrors jump out from the book, and the reader, or maybe it's just me, never truly feel involved with the story. You are just spectators, watching something happening from a distance.
Which sort of defeats the point of a book altogether.
The problem with works like these is that once you figure out what the different elements are supposed to represent, then there really isn't anything else for you to chew on. Early on in this book, I figured that the sand is supposed to represent time; the way time builds up and erodes everything; how you can never keep time at bay no matter how hard you try. Time is the great equaliser in nature, clearing away both the good and the bad. Time rules all.
You can also interpret the sand — or the sand dunes in particular — as pressures from others. Especially in a country like Japan, people have many different expectations of the roles you need to play to function as an individual in the society. And expectations can come in many forms, from that of a husband to that of an employee, etc. The dunes, then, represent these roles that we have to play, and there is no escaping no matter how hard you try. The protagonist's acceptance of his place in the village is also indicative of the dunes' symbolism as societal roles we all have to play.
With that said, once you have all of those figured out, and it is not hard to do so early on in the book, the rest of the book involves the characters going through the motion. Even though it is a relatively short book, it still took me quite some time to finish, especially when the centre portion of the book started to drag its feet. And just like how many Japanese authors — or books translated from Japanese — have this stiff, stilted way of writing, that is the case for The Woman in the Dunes also. The result is a narrative that never quite comes alive on the pages. None of the thrills and horrors jump out from the book, and the reader, or maybe it's just me, never truly feel involved with the story. You are just spectators, watching something happening from a distance.
Which sort of defeats the point of a book altogether.
purely bcs i was having trouble visualising the setting and the storyline kinda stressing me out to the point it affected my whole judgement towards this book
3.5/5
This is an interesting book, but it is rather overrated. It's rather obnoxious of me to continue to make this comparison, but Kafka does the dread better and touches upon more of the facets of analysis that I so enjoy, and it's hard to rate this better when incomplete and far earlier published [b:The Castle|7445|The Glass Castle|Jeannette Walls|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1523542886s/7445.jpg|2944133] still holds up so marvelously in terms of craftsmanship and tilting the looking glass just right. Perhaps I need my allegories delivered to me in a more subtle manner, and my less than impressed reaction stems from not being allowed the narrative a tad more before being hit by a number of flashing roadblocks screaming MEANING! MEANING! MEANING! For a comparison that's closer to home's sake, I preferred Kawabata's [b:Thousand Cranes|14027|Thousand Cranes|Yasunari Kawabata|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388205415s/14027.jpg|25753548] in this regard, whose dark elegance had similar overtones and sex and doom that was painted in overtures rather than set out in the monotone obsessions of a scrabbling mind. I suppose the last is scarier, but as it was with 'Jude the Obscure', it's hard to care about a main character's travails when they continually inflict themselves upon a voiceless other who suffers so much more and has so much more to say.
It was still too soon to be frightened.I haven't gotten this much of a vibe of "this author was really trying to write a classic, weren't they" since my time with 'Brideshead Revisited'. I liked Abe's work better for it being fundamentally more disturbing, but it got predictable after a certain point, and I wasn't as filled with horror as I imagine the average (male) reader would be at the text's conclusion. The metaphors one could construct with this are myriad, from the tenets of communism to the extractions of capitalism, the grinding of society to the grimacing of nature, but it's too tempting to slip into one paradigm or another and raise up this text on a castle in the sky, so while I appreciated the genius that went into the construction of the story, I've read too much Jelinek and Kafka to be particularly amazed by it. One praise I will give Abe is his way with conflict, so despite my less than impressed reception of this, I wouldn't mind seeking out his other works when I have a very particular itch to scratch. I don't, however, has as much interest in the film adaptation of this as I did before the reading. The cat's content in the bag, shall we say, and I don't need to observe that singular breed of degradation (not even the emphasis of the story!!! but, disappointingly, such often is man) more than once.
Without the threat of punishment there is no joy in flight.What I admired most about Abe's choices in writing is how simply he generated his plot: place an everyman in an extraordinary simple hell and watch as he eats himself alive. I say everyman because of how centered this mid 20th century narrative is around conventional definitions of masculinity, sexuality, and how such ideologies function in a society that raises such into an artificial hierarchy. It made the main character odious enough that, by the half mark, I didn't care much whether he lived or died, escaped or submitted, which allowed me to more objectively evaluate what the novel was trying to achieve, which in hindsight of my rating may have worked to the novel's disfavor. Still, this is definitely a solid entry into a very singular tradition of writing that tips the normal over into the nightmare with barely a brush of a fingertip, and if I hadn't imbibed so much horror in my youth and the less sensational and thus more shudderingly effective tragedies later on, I likely would have been more amazed by the imagined terrors contained in this work. I suppose the real issue is how much society hasn't really changed despite how many other paradigms have achieved enough popularity to be kowtowed to in the political arena, so what could have showed the needle inexorably approaching the eye ended up being a little too much of a cheap jump scare.
This is an interesting book, but it is rather overrated. It's rather obnoxious of me to continue to make this comparison, but Kafka does the dread better and touches upon more of the facets of analysis that I so enjoy, and it's hard to rate this better when incomplete and far earlier published [b:The Castle|7445|The Glass Castle|Jeannette Walls|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1523542886s/7445.jpg|2944133] still holds up so marvelously in terms of craftsmanship and tilting the looking glass just right. Perhaps I need my allegories delivered to me in a more subtle manner, and my less than impressed reaction stems from not being allowed the narrative a tad more before being hit by a number of flashing roadblocks screaming MEANING! MEANING! MEANING! For a comparison that's closer to home's sake, I preferred Kawabata's [b:Thousand Cranes|14027|Thousand Cranes|Yasunari Kawabata|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388205415s/14027.jpg|25753548] in this regard, whose dark elegance had similar overtones and sex and doom that was painted in overtures rather than set out in the monotone obsessions of a scrabbling mind. I suppose the last is scarier, but as it was with 'Jude the Obscure', it's hard to care about a main character's travails when they continually inflict themselves upon a voiceless other who suffers so much more and has so much more to say.
Beautiful scenery need not be sympathetic to man.