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trin 's review for:
Kangaroo Notebook
by Kōbō Abe
Just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from here, allow me to confess: I am not a fan of [b:Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland|1503618|Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass|Lewis Carroll|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1184375079s/1503618.jpg|2375385]. Didn’t like it when I was a kid, wasn’t fond of it when I reread it for a class in college. (I bet you can guess how AWESOME it is listening to a bunch of over-eager English majors start insisting that Alice is really a metaphor for post-colonial blah blah blah.) I do dig me some whimsy (not to mention some Wimsey), and as my recent [a:Murakami|819789|J.D. Salinger|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1189260887p2/819789.jpg] marathon has made clear, I can be a big fan of Japanese surrealism, too. But I feel there needs to be a sense of balance, so when a story tips you head over heels down the rabbit hole to a place where there’s no logic, no plot, and no characters, it’s just too much for me. My eyes glaze over and I end up bored and annoyed.
Kobo Abe’s Kangaroo Notebook epitomized all the potential pitfalls one could imagine popping up in surrealist literature. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist discovers radish sprouts (which are referred to throughout the whole book as “radish sprouts”—why the quotes?) growing from his calves. This initial unexplained weird event sets him on a path that catapults him from one unexplained weird event to the next. Everything that happens is related in one of those flat, unemotional first person POVs—possibly my least favorite narrative technique ever. The people he encounters are devices, not human beings. And while the cover copy claims that the book is supposed to be a biting satire of modern Japanese life, I really did not get that from the text at all. This may be in part my failing as an ignorant Westerner, but nothing in this book felt astutely realized; it was all either very very generic (bureaucracy? Dehumanizing and annoying!) or incredibly obscure.
It also just wasn’t very well-written—or anyway, well-translated. On the most basic level, Abe (or Abe’s translator) couldn’t seem to figure out if he was writing in the present or the past tense, so he settled for swapping back and forth repeatedly. And unlike in even Murakami’s most confounding work, there wasn’t a single beautiful—or even a distinct—piece of imagery to be found. It was all a muddle.
Abe’s [b:The Woman in the Dunes|9998|The Woman in the Dunes|Kobo Abe|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166112398s/9998.jpg|58336] is supposed to be a classic, one of the things you MUST READ if you are cultivating an interest in Japanese literature. I am now, however, disinclined to.
Kobo Abe’s Kangaroo Notebook epitomized all the potential pitfalls one could imagine popping up in surrealist literature. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist discovers radish sprouts (which are referred to throughout the whole book as “radish sprouts”—why the quotes?) growing from his calves. This initial unexplained weird event sets him on a path that catapults him from one unexplained weird event to the next. Everything that happens is related in one of those flat, unemotional first person POVs—possibly my least favorite narrative technique ever. The people he encounters are devices, not human beings. And while the cover copy claims that the book is supposed to be a biting satire of modern Japanese life, I really did not get that from the text at all. This may be in part my failing as an ignorant Westerner, but nothing in this book felt astutely realized; it was all either very very generic (bureaucracy? Dehumanizing and annoying!) or incredibly obscure.
It also just wasn’t very well-written—or anyway, well-translated. On the most basic level, Abe (or Abe’s translator) couldn’t seem to figure out if he was writing in the present or the past tense, so he settled for swapping back and forth repeatedly. And unlike in even Murakami’s most confounding work, there wasn’t a single beautiful—or even a distinct—piece of imagery to be found. It was all a muddle.
Abe’s [b:The Woman in the Dunes|9998|The Woman in the Dunes|Kobo Abe|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166112398s/9998.jpg|58336] is supposed to be a classic, one of the things you MUST READ if you are cultivating an interest in Japanese literature. I am now, however, disinclined to.