I've been reading The woman in the dunes by Kōbō Abe. The book is good, or at least it keeps me interested unlike other stuff I've been trying to read recently. The story starts by presenting the protagonist, a man in his thirties whose hobby is to collect insects, that taking some days off work goes on a trip to the desert in the hope of finding a special kind of beetle. At first, he arrives in the desert and spends the whole day looking for the beetle just to find nothing. Then, he asks the locals for a place in which he could pass the night and they present him to a woman that will let him spend the night in her house. Here it’s where it starts getting weird. In that desert there are some houses that are inside holes in the dunes, with ten to fifteen meters of profundity, and the woman lives in one of those houses. So he descends to the house by using a rope and gets to witness how the woman spends all night getting rid of the sand that has got into the house. The next day he wakes up, gets everything ready for continuing with his search, and just when he is getting out of the house to go up the rope, he realises the rope isn’t there any more. After some thinking and after exchanging some words with the woman, he realises she and the people of the town have conspired to leave him down there with no escape, so he can help the woman to deal with the sand that every night has to be put out of the hole.

After that the man refuses to accept that situation and starts thinking about a way of escaping. I mainly like the book because of the atmosphere it has, everything is depicted as absurd and hopeless, which kind of reminds me of Kafka's stories, in which the characters are put in absurd situations that they have no way of solving. I also like that the prose is simple and yet sometimes poetic, and that the story despite being set in a real world environment feels extraordinary and doesn’t fall in the for me boring depiction of way too normal people, events and activities that I’ve been getting a little bit tired of recently.

Well, thanks for reading and I hope you got even if just in the slightest a little bit interested in The woman in the dunes. Also, I will appreciate a lot any corrections.