Woman in the Dunes (Kobo Abe, 1962)

This isn't my copy, but a cool cover nonetheless. I covet. Mine's the 2006 Penguin with a Corbis stock photo.  I mean it has a figure prostrate (or is it supine) in the dunes, could be a woman, could be a man, the ambiguity is effective. The dunes undulate, the contrast is high, skin like hot burnished metal or grilled silica, great. Figure supine in dunes undulating. Yes, but it's a Corbis stock photo.

I always judge a book by its cover and it looks like this one fits the dark passions that boil in the book. Maybe it's a still from the 1964 Hiroshi Teshigahara film? I've got that lined up to watch.

Again, this book slots nicely into the others that have come across my lap of late. Definite references to Kafka - the protagonist is an entomologist who describes himself and others as insects, and refelcts on the life of insects; he also refers to himself as a mole at one point, cf. Kafka's The Burrow.

A man collecting insects at a remote village enagged in an endless battle against encroaching dunes finds himself trapped, or at least an extended guest, in the titular woman's rotting house at the bottom of a sand pit. A less epic and far more creepy imagination of life at the bottom of the pit of Sarlaac.

Come to mama.

Food and water lowered in on a rope, sand hauled out. Food and water withheld if the Sisyphean task of keeping the hole clear of the rottig house is not worked at. Man plots escape, but what kind of life is he escaping to, if not one analogously absurd? Where some do Sudoku on the Tube, I ponder such questions. 

There's a great sense of desperation in sweat, snot, mucus membranes clotted and caked with sand. Visceral to say the least, there's a peppering of hot, odd Japanese erotica throughout. Suicide is pondered to spite his captors. He tries to catch crows. The sand is figured as a kind of living entity, as the exemplary condition of existence. Atomic, coherent, constantly in flux, dry, wet, all-consuming. It's a great read that delivers always from the fevered insides of the entomologist's subjectivity, not to mention the organs of his rage and desire.

Resonates with Camus' desert obsessions. Cred AJ.

Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand