The Woman in the Dunes
Kōbō Abe's 1962 novel strands an amateur entomologist in a sand pit with a woman whose nightly work is shoveling out the dunes that threaten to bury her house. The setup is existential; the execution is obsessively physical. Sand gets into everything: food, sleep, sex, thought. It is one of the few genuinely unsettling novels that also works as a page-turner, partly because Abe never lets his protagonist stop digging long enough to rest.Vintage's edition uses the E. Dale Saunders translation and presents the novel in a compact paperback format. Abe's sand is both setting and antagonist, a substance that erases the distinction between inside and outside. A classic that earns its reputation without asking to be liked, best approached by readers who want fiction to get under the skin and stay there.
