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Review
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Some of Kobo Abe's readers will recall Kafka's manipulation of a nightmarish tyranny of the unknown, others Beckett's selection of sites like the sand pit...as a symbol of the undignified human predicament." -- Saturday Review
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sand sticks to everything,
By
This review is from: The Woman in the Dunes (Paperback)
"Woman in the Dunes" is on every short-list of "must reads" for Japanese literature. It is an incredibly powerful and intense story, with the ability to make you feel as suffocated and trapped as Jumpei in the sand pit. Of all the Japanese books I have read, I found "Woman in the Dunes" to be the most direct, the least subtle. The entire story happens out in the open, naked and vulnerable, raw and hurting. However, there is some metaphor here, but I think each person will find their own. What gripped me about the story was the sometimes hopelessness of life, of being trapped inside the endless task of working without gain, putting all of your sights and ambitions of some small purchase you might make with your efforts, perhaps a radio. Fighting against the walls of your prison at first, you eventually find that you have become comfortable with your slavery, and then there is no more need to lock the doors. Your comfort has become your chains. An emotionally challenging and sometimes uncomfortable book, but very rewarding. I won't be able to look at sand again in the same way. It doesn't seem quite so innocent anymore.
5.0 out of 5 stars
sand sticks to everything,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Woman in the Dunes (Paperback)
"Woman in the Dunes" is on every short-list of "must reads" for Japanese literature. It is an incredibly powerful and intense story, with the ability to make you feel as suffocated and trapped as Jumpei in the sand pit. Of all the Japanese books I have read, I found "Woman in the Dunes" to be the most direct, the least subtle. The entire story happens out in the open, naked and vulnerable, raw and hurting. However, there is some metaphor here, but I think each person will find their own. What gripped me about the story was the sometimes hopelessness of life, of being trapped inside the endless task of working without gain, putting all of your sights and ambitions of some small purchase you might make with your efforts, perhaps a radio. Fighting against the walls of your prison at first, you eventually find that you have become complacent with your slavery, and then there is no more need to lock the doors. Your complacency has become your chains. An emotionally challenging and sometimes uncomfortable book, but very rewarding. I won't be able to look at sand again in the same way. It doesn't seem quite so innocent anymore.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Masterpiece of modern literature,
This review is from: The Woman in the Dunes (Paperback)
In Kobo Abe's "The Woman in the Dunes," a teacher and amateur entomologist sets out on a vacation to find rare insect specimens near a remote sea-side village. After missing his bus back to town, the man is led into the strange village and given a place to sleep by the villagers. Oddly, the house he is taken to is at the bottom of a vast sandpit where a mysterious woman lives, bereaved of her husband and child. It isn't long before the man realizes that the woman is nothing more than an obsequious servant to the villagers of the town, forced to shovel off the inexorably advancing sand dunes in order to protect herself and the village from the baneful effects of the sand. And this is the beginning of the story, in which the man is now a slave himself, and must reconcile himself to the morbidity of living the rest of his life in exile, banished from society into a hole where he fights everyday a perpetual and ultimately fruitless battle with the ever-encroaching dunes. The story is beautifully rendered, and depicted with an equal amount of hope and tragedy. Kobo Abe has given us a transparent picture of what it is like to be a pariah in society; and shows the reader the racing emotions and flailing plans in the mind of a trapped man who is inevitably linked to the precipitous pit, maybe even was before he left for the village. A true masterpiece of modern literature.
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