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A review by cuckmulligan
Kangaroo Notebook by Kōbō Abe
2.0
I respect this book's strangeness, though can't honestly say it came together for me. Took me a while to get through this skinny little book.
There's a cliche bit of writing advice having to do with surreal/absurd elements in narratives. It more or less goes that the nonsensical should be used strategically and sparingly as a way of heightening or complicating a baseline reality. If you stack absurdities on top of absurdities you risk making your story feel inconsequential. I have always resisted this advice...shouldn't fiction, refuge from the real that it is, get as weird with it as it likes? Well, here's a cautionary tale. I get the sense this brand of dense, off-the-wall surrealism is easier to pull off in a shorter form. I'm reading the short stories of Leonora Carrington which are bonkers in a way kind of similar to this book, yet they work better because they don't wear out their welcome. There are individual scenes and images that will stick with me for a while--the turnip legs, the recurrence of the hospital bed, the farcical plot to "euthanize" an annoying fellow patient. Dialogue was often funny. Not sure what to make of the pedo stuff.
This hasn't scared me off from reading more Kobo Abe! This is a minor work, apparently. The Woman in the Dunes is the one he's known for and what I ought to have read.
There's a cliche bit of writing advice having to do with surreal/absurd elements in narratives. It more or less goes that the nonsensical should be used strategically and sparingly as a way of heightening or complicating a baseline reality. If you stack absurdities on top of absurdities you risk making your story feel inconsequential. I have always resisted this advice...shouldn't fiction, refuge from the real that it is, get as weird with it as it likes? Well, here's a cautionary tale. I get the sense this brand of dense, off-the-wall surrealism is easier to pull off in a shorter form. I'm reading the short stories of Leonora Carrington which are bonkers in a way kind of similar to this book, yet they work better because they don't wear out their welcome. There are individual scenes and images that will stick with me for a while--the turnip legs, the recurrence of the hospital bed, the farcical plot to "euthanize" an annoying fellow patient. Dialogue was often funny. Not sure what to make of the pedo stuff.
This hasn't scared me off from reading more Kobo Abe! This is a minor work, apparently. The Woman in the Dunes is the one he's known for and what I ought to have read.