Romanian review: Dacă ai lua cartea ca atare, fără să te gândești că există o simbolistică/filozofie în spate, atunci ai avea de-a face cu o carte monotonă, relativ plictisitoare. ,,Femeia nisipurilor" este cel mai probabil o reinterpretare a Mitului lui Sisif, munca absurdă, fără folos, de a îndepărta nisipul, doar pentru ca altul să-i ia locul, amintește de povestea lui Sisif.
Cu siguranță există o mulțime de interpretări pentru această carte. Eu am asociat îndepărtatul nisipului și tentativele protagonistului de a evada cu încercarea umanității de a atinge cunoașterea deplină, încercare fără de speranță, care se termină în frustrare și dezamăgire.
Finalul în care, deși Niki Jumpei putea evada fără să i se opună nimeni, se hotărăște să rămână în sat , îmi sugerează ideea că singura cale de a scăpa de suferința, de frustrarea și nefericirea căutării cunoașterii absolute este să ne acceptăm condiția de ființe limitate, exact ca Sisif. Calea spre fericire este monotonia și renunțarea la idealuri înalte, care depășesc mintea umană.
Probabil că autorul a avut mult mai multe de transmis, femeia fără nume cu care Niki Jumpei este forțat să trăiască simbolizează cu certitudine ceva, dar nu sunt încă sigur ce. Am citit că unii oameni au interpretat-o fie ca pe calea spre salvare, fie ca pe calea spre autodistrugere, condamnare.
,,Femeia nisipurilor" a fost o carte oarecum bizară, claustrofobă, care mă face, chiar și la ceva timp după terminarea ei, să încerc să-i înțeleg toate sensurile, motiv pentru care eu îi dau trei stele și jumătate.



English review: If you were to take the book at face value, without thinking that there is some symbolism/philosophy behind it, then you would be dealing with a monotonous, relatively boring book. "The Woman in the Dunes" is most likely a reinterpretation of the Myth of Sisyphus, the absurd, pointless labor of removing sand, only for another to take its place, is reminiscent of the story of Sisyphus.
There are certainly lots of interpretations for this book. I associate the removal of the sand and the protagonist's attempts to escape with humanity's attempt to attain full knowledge, a hopeless attempt that ends in frustration and disappointment.
The ending in which, though Niki Jumpei could have escaped unopposed, he decides to stay in the village , suggests to me the idea that the only way to escape the suffering, frustration and unhappiness of the quest for absolute knowledge is to accept our condition as limited beings, just like Sisyphus. The way to happiness is monotony and the renunciation of lofty ideals that transcend the human mind.
Perhaps the author had much more to convey, the nameless woman that Niki Jumpei is forced to live with definitely symbolizes something, but I'm not sure what yet. I've read that some people have interpreted it as either the path to salvation or the path to self-destruction.
"The Woman in the Dunes" was a somewhat bizarre, claustrophobic book that makes me, even some time after finishing it, try to understand all its meanings, which is why I give it three and a half stars.

مرد جوان که حرفه ی حشره شناسی دارد برای جمع کردن حشره وارد دِهی می‌شود که اطرافش پر از شن است در آنجا با زنی در گودالی گرفتار می‌شود که هر روزه خطر ریزش شن هس و اگر آن‌ها را تخیله نکنند زیر شن مدفون می‌شوند این مرد برای فرار از آن نقطه دست به نقشه‌های می‌کشد و موفق می‌شود ولی بعد از مدتی توسط اهالی دِه اسیر شده دوباره سر جای اولش برمی‌گردد و با زن رابطه‌ی وابستگی ایجاد می‌شود و تلاش‌ها و کارهای او برای فرار ادامه دارد و در این بین متوجه می‌شود که با استفاده از خاصیت مویینگی شن می‌تواند آب بدست آورد و زمانی که زن را اهالی ده به خاطر بارداری به بیمارستان می‌برند نردبانی که مدت‌ها می‌خواسته باقی می‌ماند ولی مرد تمایلی ندارد که از آن منطقه دور شود می‌توان نتیجه گرفت که تلاش ها و کوشش‌های بسیار که با شکست روبه‌رو می‌شود بعد مدتی آدمیزاد به شرایط موجود خود را وفق می‌دهد و عادت می‌کند به این شرایط.

Sadece son zamanlarda değil şimdiye kadar okuduğum en iyi kitaplardan biriydi. Uzun zamandır özlemini çektiğim "Suç ve Ceza", "Satranç" ve hatta "Monte Kristo Kontu" seviyesinde bir kitaptı. Gerçekten okurken çok zevk aldım çok mutlu oldum.
Bir adam var. Bir böcek kolleksiyoncusu.Kaplan sineği denen az görülür bir böceği bulmak için deniz kenarında üca bir köye gidiyor. Ve bu köyde hava kararana kadar Kaplan sineğinin peşinde dolanıyor ve akşam üstü köylülerden geceyi geçirmek için bir yer istiyor.
Köyden bahsetmek gerekirse köy deniz kenarında fakir mi fakir, deniz kenarında olmasına ragmen balıkçılık bile yapılamayan ve en önemli özelliği kumlarla kaplı olması olan allahın unuttuğu bir köy.
Kum bütün hayatı kaplamış durumda. Tek motivasyoları "kum" bu adamların. Tüm hayatlarını yönlendiriyor kum. Ona gore yatıp ona gore kalkıyorlar. Yedikleri içtikleri hep kuma gore ayarlı. Afedersiniz kıç aralarında kum taneleriyle yaşıyorlar. Ve bu esasen yaşanması imkansız olan bu köyü asla terketmiyorlar.
İşte bizim böcekçiyide gidip bir kum çukurunda yapayalnız yaşayan otuzlarında bir kadının yanına koyyorlar.
Aslında bu bir adam kaçırma eylemi. Çok kısa bir sure içinde anlıyoruz ki o kum çukurunda ki evden çıkmanın imkanı yok.
Adam esir alındığını anlıyor. Ve muhteşem kitap başlıyor.
Adam kaçmak için herşeyi deniyor. Aklınıza gelen gelmeyen herşeyi deniyor.
en sonunda...
Edebiyat hat safhada. Benzetmelerine örneklemelerine ve tariflerine bayıldım. Bayıldım Bayıldım.
Hikaye ve kurgu zaten zeka örneği. Nasıl düşünebiliyor böyle şeyleri.
Ve alt metin. Satır araları. Ya adam bütün hayatı anlatmış. Mecazlar metaforlar benzeteler imalar.
Çok dolu kitap çok.
Yavaş yavaş okumak lazım.
Hatta hayatta sadece bir kaç kitap için söyledim (Mesela "Körleşme"), Kumların Kadını içinde söyleyeceğim; bir daha okumak lazım. Hatta hayat boyunca ara ara okumak lazım.
Baş yapıt şaheser efsane

Never in my life did I think I'd enjoy entire chapters about bugs, sand and more sand.

This was a great break from my only exposure to Japanese literature (Murakami) and it was a fantastic book. Full review to come. First I need to shake off some sand.

My first year at SFSU, me and my roommate decided to recommend books to each other, books we loved, in order to get to know each other better. It was the kind of quasi-homoerotic, pseudo-intellectual buddy activity which has since become the staple of our relationship.

The first book he recommended was "Woman in the Dunes". I struggled with it and felt intellectually inferior. He was my friend and I wanted to like it. I tried really hard. I fell asleep reading it at least three times. I remember one late, drunken night riding home from some bar on the MUNI, him asking me what I thought of the book, and faltering through a pretentious attempt at praising the existential wonders of the book. I thought he looked disappointed, and that I had failed him.

When I finished the book, I decided to man-up and tell him what I really felt. "I couldn't stand this book," I said. "It was boring and tedious." I waited for him to lash into me with accusations of my stupidity, and for our friendship to end. Instead, he laughed, and said, "Yeah, I really hate this book, too. I just made you read it to fuck with you."

“While he mused on the effect of the flowing sands, he was seized from time to time by hallucinations in which he himself began to move with the flow.”

This book is about a man who tricked and has to live in a house at the bottom of a sand pit with a woman. They can't escape the sand which settles on them even as they sleep. As much as they shovel it away, they can't get rid of it.

This is definitely a unique story. I now know more about sand than I probably need to. I never really thought much about sand but I kind of didn't have a choice in this book.

I read this, second year at Durham, so 86/87, was in rebellion against Geography books. Probably attracted by the naked woman torso on the cover, however, the writing is sensual and erotic. It's only years later do I discover that Japan is possibly one of the most prolific in terms of sexual, and sensual i.e. as in good - Nobel good, not trashy sexy.
It's something of a contradiction given the very formal and discreet nature of Japanese culture. Interesting to say the least.
Also a very strong tradition of Romance. "An unrequited love affair," was the response from a Japanese girl (not my class, a friend's ESL). The topic was career plans - could this indicate the repressed status of female in Japan, OR, the importance of passion, the pain of experience, the profundity of expression - it's very 1920s bohemian?

I think there was a profound absorption of European culture post WW1; it was the time Japan opened to the West.

Kobo Abe, however, seems to have left this self-exploration and moved to a distinctly post-modern, at least post WWII feel. It is strange how writers can reflect the psychology of a country, the whole often un-specified in dialogue, or else restricted to a political frame.

Hence my long standing interest in Japanese writers.

Suffocating, hot, and sandy. Sand everywhere. Sand in your ears, in your pants, sticking to your throat. This was such a claustrophobic read. Reminded me of The Metamorphosis in some ways. Full of existential dread and poses the question: Are we all not just digging sand?

While reading this book my thoughts were constantly racing towards Camus’s ‘The Myth of Sisyphus” n  "From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all."n

Premises of hope, alienation and irrationality reeking from every printed word induced me into inferring Kobo Abe being the Japanese Camus. The protagonist Junpei Niki illustrates traits of Sisyphean persona; pursuing meaningless task of digging buckets of sand from the pit only to see it fill up again.

Junpei an entomologist on a mission to find rarest sand beetles finds himself deceivingly trapped by the villagers in a sand dune to dig up loads of sand in order to sell it to the cities. The sandpit encloses a widow’s house who manipulates Junpei to help her clear the sand or her house may collapse with its graveness.

Influenced on the lines of Sartre’s ‘No Exit’; conveys existence of a “hell hole” that life somehow seems to open when stagnated survival justifies adaptation. It’s only through the darkness of hell does the irony of hope and absurdity thrive the strongest. The sand filled dwelling of enslaved Junpei is a metaphor of the daily anguish of a modern lives depleted in a bedlam and uncertainty of optimism and ludicrousness. Abe speaks about adapting without being adamant on a fixed position to survive the competition.

"Didn't unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position? If one were to give up a fixed position and abandon oneself to the movement of the sands, competition would soon stop."

The ubiquitous sand emerges to be a disposition in its own transforming from a soundless spectator to a sadistic tormentor with harrowing depths of obscurity and ordeal. Sand with its mass of minute grains is a nasty piece of work corroding every speck of trust propelling it into an abyss of sardonic paranoia.

Primarily Junpei appeared to be a pathetic and more interested ogling at the naked widow rather than trying hard to free himself. But as the novel proceeded one could find him to be a victim of impractical circumstances drowned in confusion and horror. Until he could make sense of the happenings, time had elapsed and made him sympathetic towards the woman and accustomed to infertile survival. Junpei’s return to the sand dune after having a successful escape and garnered sympathy towards the widow and villagers, exhibit signs of the Stockholm syndrome.

Is it then that the barren sand resembles the utilitarian perils that we as individuals strive against everyday and at times when the going gets tough, we resort to detrimental actions or are compassionate to the soulless endurance?

В один из августовских дней пропал человек. Он был женат, работал учителем. Жил в большом мегаполисе. Но никто его не искал. Формально, конечно, искали. Но поскольку, причины не нашли, "по прошествии семи лет на основании статьи 30 Гражданского кодекса человек был признан умершим." Первый и очевидный смысл - люди безнадежно одиноки, даже если женаты, даже если есть работа, друзья. Это кажется абсурдом, крайней степенью, но правда в том, что можно быть одиноким в семье, на работе и в большом городе.
А что такое общество? Это множество, подобное песку, где каждая песчинка - человек. "Бесплодность песка, каким он представляется обычно, объясняется не просто его сухостью, а беспрерывным движением, которого не может перенести ничто живое. Как это похоже на унылую жизнь людей, изо дня в день цепляющихся друг за друга."
Притча о человеке, ушедшем в пески в поисках мушки, и обретшем смысл, прозрение, показывает нам состояние современного человека:
"то, что его увлек песок и насекомые, в конце концов было лишь попыткой, пусть хоть на время, убежать от нудных обязанностей бесцветного существования…"
У Ники Дзюмпэя явно прослеживается типичная ка��тина принятия неизбежного: отрицание, гнев, торг, депрессия и принятие, может какие-то стадии в сглаженной форме, какие-то, наоборот, в более ярко выраженной. Сначала он не верит в возможность того, что он пойман в ловушку, затем злится, приводит доводы, что его ищут и жители деревни совершают преступление, насильно удерживая его. Пытается договориться с женщиной. Это сродни духовной смерти и перерождению. Читая газету со статьями, среди которых нет ни одной, которую бы было жалко пропустить, Ники приходит к выводу: "если бы на свете существовало лишь то, что жалко упустить, действительность превратилась бы в хрупкую стеклянную поделку, к которой страшно прикоснуться. Но жизнь — те же газетные статьи. Поэтому каждый, понимая ее бессмысленность, ось компаса помещает в своем доме."
Парадоксальный вывод для человека, пойманного в ловушку, обесценивающий то, к чему он стремился, возврату к своей размеренной жизни.
"...разве мир в конечном счете не похож на песок?.. Этот самый песок, когда он в спокойном состоянии, никак не проявляет своего существа… На самом деле не песок движется, а само движение есть песок… ". Песок, как отрицание стабильности.
Понимать роман можно по-разному. Бездумный, бесцельный и неэффективный труд ради труда навевает мысли об авторитаризме, принудительный, неоплачиваемый труд - это рабство.
"Когда он встал, суставы затрещали, как железная крыша под порывом ветра. С опаской мужчина заглянул в бак. Он был снова наполнен до краев. Мужчина смочил полотенце и приложил его к лицу. Дрожь пронзила все тело, как искра — лампу дневного света. Он протер шею, бока, стер песок между пальцами. Может быть, такими мгновениями и нужно определять смысл жизни?!"
"Начав работать, он удивился, что не ощутил того сопротивления, которого ждал от себя. В чем причина этой перемены? Может быть, в боязни остаться без воды или в долге перед женщиной, в возможно, в характере самого труда? Действительно, труд помогает человеку примириться с бегущим временем, даже когда оно бежит бесцельно."
На одной из лекций он запомнил слова лектора: «Нет иного пути возвыситься над трудом, как посредством самого труда. Не труд сам по себе имеет ценность, а преодоление труда трудом… Истинная ценность труда в силе его самоотрицания…»
Он убегал, его поймали и водворили в яму. Ему удалось добиться независимости от "кнута" - воды, и однажды, когда женщину увезли, лестницу оставили. Он мог бежать, но не сделал этого.
Песок преобразил героя. Он осознал, что до этого он видел не песок, а лишь песчинки.

What happens if while on vacation, you disappear? Who would miss you, take out newspaper ads for you, hang missing-person flyers on poles for you, call the cops for you?

High in the night sky there was a continuous, discordant sound of wind blowing at a different velocity. And on the ground the wind was a knife continually shaving off thin layers of sand, as a village of sand lost all hope. The village's only resourcefulness has now become enslavement. Poor entomologist, a man who finds pleasure in the discovery of new insects, a man who has studied sand, now wanders into this snow pit on his vacation. Poor clueless vacationer who is tricked into spending the night in the home of a mysterious woman.

Now he knows: "If life were made up only of important things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home." He escapes home and now wants to be home, but soon learns that he is trapped. At the center of his bewilderment and anger is the mysterious woman he has been forced to live with. Together, they must survive in this blaze of sand that seeps through every pore and rains avalanches; sand that forces them to sleep with a towel over their faces; sand that makes them eat with an umbrella over their heads.

What do you do when all caves in and all you can see in the distance is a blanket of sand? Who do you become? What is this theme of helplessness that pervades this book, takes on different forms and appears to us as something we are all familiar with? The book is surprising, a bit peculiar, somewhat daunting, and at moments, jarring. The man's poignant and sometimes lewd musings showcase the peculiarity of the human instinct when forced to succumb; although the partial thoughts on spirituality, death (and spiritual rape??) are unconvincing and most likely the meanderings of a trapped mind as the man's stance seems to render starkly the psychology of bondage. What's real and what's not? And what voice is it that pierces the narrative occasionally, that taunting, assertive voice?

"Things with form were empty when placed beside sand. The only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of form." And this woman was without form. My regret was never getting to fully see her shape, gage her thoughts, learn about her story and the story of her family (aside from the brief story of the sand tragedy that befell them). This strangely mythic woman was my puzzle piece, but it's possible that she wouldn't be yours. Maybe you would be able to see her through the sand, or maybe her unusual presence is all you would need.

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