A really cumbersome read, with little resolution by its conclusion.

книга вроде как заявлена как детектив, но по факту совершенно им не является. да, там есть человек, который пропал, человек, который хочет найти, и человек, который ищет, однако всё это куда больше походит на экзистенциальный роман (и именно по этой причине человек, который читает, в разные моменты становится и человеком ищущим, и человеком пропавшим, и человеком, жаждущим ответов)
открытая концовка принесла облегчение лишь тем, что после неё можно было закрыть книгу (редкие книги давались мне так долго и трудно)
в целом, опыт, конечно, интересный (на мне поставили)
но подозреваю, что эта не та книга, с которой нужно начинать знакомство с Кобо Абэ

Abe bu romanın isminin önerdiğinin ne eksiğini ne de fazlasını sunuyor okuyucuya. İsimsiz bir dedektifle, ismi cismi belli olmayan bir şehirdeki kayıp vakasını inceliyoruz. Post modern ve vasat bir polisiye.

The movie The Man Without a Map (1968) does a good job of covering all the plot points in this detective story. I was curious to see if the story from the book was any different than the movie, but other than a short scene or so and some additional internal dialogue they were pretty much the same.

The writing is good, so maybe worth it for you.

If you like Michaelangelo Antonioni movies you'll love Abe. Just like Antonioni he plays with issues of lost identity in the modern world. I also recommend "The Face of Another". Abe deserves a much wider audience.

There is an old saying that you cannot argue (logic) someone into changing their views of how something tastes or smells. This applies to me with Kobo Abe and the two novels of his I've read: he is cilantro to me and I can't stand cilantro in any recipe whatsoever. This novel, supposedly a detective novel of sorts, jumps from one unconnected scene and unconnected group to another, from one specious theory to another until an inconclusive ending. Cilantro.

This book was a delightful bit of déjà vu, written in such a way as to bring the angst of the protagonist to the reader. If you've ever had a bought of existential angst, this book will feel oh so familiar.

Bireyin isimsiz kalabalıklardan atomize edilip azade edilme noktasında bir roman.

Kurgusallık içinde üretilmiş bir alanda, türetilmiş bireyin hayatının yüzeyinden şehirli insanın yeraltı dünyasına iniyoruz.

Yazar her ne kadar sözde haritasına yer yer bağlı kalmasa da burada Gestalt kuramının iskeleti romanı sağlam tutuyor. Bütünü oluşturanın toplamdan daha fazlası olduğunu, bütünün parçaların arasındaki ilişkilere bağlı olduğunu bir kez daha hatırlatıyor.

This starts off as a detective novel, albeit Japanese, peppered with the odd observations along the lines of: “he had the neck of one who was untrustworthy”. Somewhere along the way it becomes something else entirely and it is that journey that held me the whole time.

The flow is something I have encountered before in Japanese novels, it is like you have missed a page or a whole chapter. You are reading and suddenly you realise that the flow has substantially altered but you don’t know where so you go back and re-read the previous pages and still you cannot find where it shifted but it really is like there is a page missing except it is an ebook.

So you read on and just get over it but you find yourself going back and re-reading chunks. It is disorienting but after a while it becomes normal. The story per se is completely unsustainable and yet it becomes part of the confusing experience of reading this book. At times I had absolutely no clear idea what the detective was talking about. Was he describing a woman using landscape terms? or was he describing landscape using woman terms? or was it more of the untrustworthy neck territory?

Every single relationship in this book is just plain weird. But then again it is part of that fabric that serves to undermine you. This book may well be a subtle way of deconstructing the reader as in the reader feels deconstructed without ever piercing the mystery of this detective story.

When I think back on this book it seems to me that it happens mostly at night in places lit by bare electric bulbs in a landscape reminiscent of the underside of the tower block in Brazil mixed up with 1960’s science fiction novels. In reality I have no idea at all what this was about. It is incredibly sensual in places in ways I cannot even begin to describe.

And I loved it!

An unnamed detective is hired to find his client’s husband. The husband is a salesman who disappeared at the corner of a street near their home, and the client's brother has tried without success to find him.

The detective never seems to be quite certain what he is looking for, and the story reads often as though he has two and two in his two hands, but he cannot make them make four. He seems to be in between very distinct places for much of the book: the couple's apartment and his own office, the office and the dry channel where the prostitutes work, the office and the noodle-shop, and so on. Neither the places nor his journeys between them lead to any advancement in his case, as though the eponymous ruined map he has been given keeps him in the wrong place, rather than guiding him to where he might find answers.

In the same way, the detective seems to be in-between the pages of the book, but never quite in, let alone driving, the story. He expects to find ways of resolving the mystery through his obsessive attention to irrelevant details, like traffic patterns or matchbooks. He never seems to get any closer to the object of his search, except insofar as he begins to identify strongly with the husband, thereby failing to find either of them.

The Ruined Map is written in a naturalistic way, and is bleakly funny in places, but both characteristics serve to underline isolation as a fundamental human experience, as the detailed description of particular places throws into relief the universality of absurdity as characteristic of life.

Todavía no decido si lo entendí todo o no entendí nada

Noir, made me remember Bogart.