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A review by chrisssl
The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe
dark
3.0
This book is deeply uncomfortable to read despite containing no subject matter that is outright transgressive. A man stumbles upon a poor strange hamlet in the middle of impossible windswept sand dunes and is imprisoned with one of the resident women at the bottom of a hole. He's told his job is to keep the shifting sand from overwhelming the house (and thus the larger hamlet). What follows is a Kafka-esque nightmarish short book in which our protagonist rages against his forced captivity, the servile, diffident nature of his female companion, musing about his freedom, his escape plans and his past life - though barely lived - while the ground is literally shifting beneath his feet.
There are some unnamed captors involved but the chief antagonist as well as the setting is the sand itself, and here the author is able to invest such incredible detail and metaphor into the nature of this tiny inorganic composite rock - that nonetheless, seen as a wider system is teeming with movement, strange behaviour, indifference or maleficence to the plight of humans, and a lot of surprising complexity in which the reader and protagonist can't help but allegorize to their own affairs. Besides entertaining a bubbling, somewhat deviant, barely repressed sexual desire, which complements and heightens the protagonist's own utter lack of consent of being held in this dune, there is nothing in the book that might traditionally invoke horror - and yet the stomach undeniably tightens as you read further on; correctly guessing how it might end does nothing to alleviate the emotion of reading it happen. Predictably, though, the actually woman in this book is treated without much depth at all, subjected to an exclusively male view making her meek, sexualized, stupid and without a hint of the psychological depth that is invested in the main character. This book is lean, and yet there are tons of symbolism to unearth and more to uncover upon successive rereads if one can stomach and appreciate the unsettling atmosphere.
There are some unnamed captors involved but the chief antagonist as well as the setting is the sand itself, and here the author is able to invest such incredible detail and metaphor into the nature of this tiny inorganic composite rock - that nonetheless, seen as a wider system is teeming with movement, strange behaviour, indifference or maleficence to the plight of humans, and a lot of surprising complexity in which the reader and protagonist can't help but allegorize to their own affairs. Besides entertaining a bubbling, somewhat deviant, barely repressed sexual desire, which complements and heightens the protagonist's own utter lack of consent of being held in this dune, there is nothing in the book that might traditionally invoke horror - and yet the stomach undeniably tightens as you read further on; correctly guessing how it might end does nothing to alleviate the emotion of reading it happen. Predictably, though, the actually woman in this book is treated without much depth at all, subjected to an exclusively male view making her meek, sexualized, stupid and without a hint of the psychological depth that is invested in the main character. This book is lean, and yet there are tons of symbolism to unearth and more to uncover upon successive rereads if one can stomach and appreciate the unsettling atmosphere.