Woman in the Dunes

Can we discuss this book, Veeky Forums? I have to read it in two days. What did you guys think of it?

I liked the movie a lot

same

Just read it, it's pretty short

>200 pages in two days
Is this possible?

This is the fucking state of Veeky Forums

anything kobo abe touches is delicious

I know the author was a pretty active communist party member in his day, and IIRC at the time of writing the book.
I tried to read the whole scenario as representative of many things - shite like relationship power dynamics, existential despair, family issues and maybe one more, but in the end I kept on coming back to this notion of labor politics, with the woman as the protagonist's domineering employer or as a condensed icon for that half of the dichotomy.

I say this because I noticed that certain scenes could be read as part of the whole pink commie narrative, like how the town the woman is from is selling all that sand to a concrete company, or how the woman herself is kinda trapped in her position but never thinks twice about it because she can't imagine alternatives.

The dunes are always encroaching, the protagonist works his ass off just to keep from being buried, or how the protgonist won't even take a fucking escape route when it's presented to him outta the blue because, and this is my opinion - His spirit has been crushed, He's got no fight, he's just gonna stay the pit, thank you.

IIRC he depends on the woman for water at first, but then seizes the means to collect potable water from rain and subsequently experiences a loosening of the mental yoke manifested by his inability to control access to a basic requirement for survival - water that was previously doled out to him piecemeal. In a sense, the Man (Worker) could be said to have acquired control of one element in the greater means of production and compensation. Very commie, although I ain't wording it right.

There are a lot of things throughout that, when combined with Abe's history as a Marxist, seem to be asking me to read them as existential or sociological metaphor. Abe was always big on symbolism, he reminds me a lot of Soseki in that sense.

Example - The man is an entomologist, which evokes the basic imagery of insects in the reader, but then adds the sand pit to that theme, which leaves me thinking of those scary AF antlion things you see IRL. Difference is, in this pit the only monster waiting at the bottom to drag down the protagonist and - in a sense - consume him.
What's interesting is that in this case the monster in the pit is the protagonist himself, and I read that as fitting into the other themes of labor exploitation by the villagers and the concrete company. The inexorable crawl of sand is a great metaphor for living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck, losing a little more savings each week.

That shit feels like a sand pit.

Or at least, this was my reading.

Ironically your post shows the horrid state of Veeky Forums much more explicitly

Its a Japanese take on Kafka

Appreciate the post much, user. Did Abe ever renounce his commie politics though? All I know is that he was exomm'd after he realized the JCP was stifling his creativity.

100 pages a day is not that crazy

So this is why it has that weird picture on the cover.

Yes, especially for a book like this which is not written in a particularly challenging way (at least the translation I read). Get off Veeky Forums, sit down with some tea, and get reading. Also this guy is right. If you like Kafka you'll like this.

what’s weird about it?

For sure, I enjoyed writing it.

I think he got really heated about what the Soviets were doing in their satellite states, and came to see the communist engine in general as not all that different from standard issue imperialism.

I don't remember if he ever renounced it, but from what I know about him and his travels in Europe, what he saw happening in (Ukraine? Hungary?) would most likely have really turned him off to the whole party.

what are you, an idiot?

this is my next book. I've read box man before.

Is it in similar vein as box man guys?

No

Well, they both explore alienation, although from different angles. As other anons ITT may have said, it's, if you excuse the meme, quite kafkaesque.

Other books that were published in this edition usually have a more abstract cover art.

I thought it was pretty boring desu

Has anyone read pic related?

I started reading it because I heard he wrote absurdist fiction and the premise was interesting. But I'm getting tired of the main character describe almost everything he sees, especially knowing it's not going to go anywhere anyway. I'm think of dropping it and picking up Waiting for Godot

t. porky

It's way goddamn better than face of another, I'll say that right now.
It's been many years since I read it though so my memory of plot is shoddy, but hey.

While I appreciate the thoughtfulness of this post (thanks for writing it out user), Marxist interpretation always devalues a work too much for me. At least, the economic side of it does. Yes, you absolutely could read it this way and have a valid point, hell maybe the author even intended it to be read that way, but it seems to me that bringing labor/economic theory into any art always relegates discussion to base political posturing that ignores what the work has to say about anything else, and sometimes even digresses from the thing which that view purports to concern itself with (ie class struggle and whatever else).

I remember a constant reference to viscid saliva, bodily fluids, sand in the water and the food, which implied to me the body and soul's process of desiccation via alienation. It's easy to apply that to labor, or living, or whatever else, but I choose to think of it existentially. It's very much in a similar vein as Kafka in that the setting is peopled by those whose culture and ideology is so radically different from the protagonist's own that it drives him to madness trying to understand where he's found himself and how to make sense of the nonsensical (that may not be Kafka-like at all, but I'm thinking of the penal colony which seemed that way to me, or that story about the bouncing balls).

A lot of rambling to say nothing at all. I don't know. I wonder if it's about fate, becoming stuck/trapped due to no real fault of one's own. Or about degrees of alienation and the role that the dynamics of communication/lack thereof plays in that.

The writing style made it meh to read, but it's a fun one to think about. Good luck with your hw op, go read it now it doesn't take long at all.