Of the three Kobo Abe novels discussed here, The Ruined Mapis the longest, clearest, and most accessible.ĭisguised as a straightforward piece of genre fiction - specifically, a pulp noir detective novel - it steadily allows Kobo Abe’s signature surrealism to seep in through the cracks bit by bit, but never truly overwhelm the reader in the way that The Box Man does.Īt a little over 200 pages long, The Ruined Map is only slightly longer than The Secret Rendezvous, but it probably takes less time to read due to its clearer, more traditional, less absurdist approach to writing. So, if you’re looking to explore the world and writings of the surrealist and Kafkaesque Kobo Abe, these three books offer the perfect place to start.
Reading them in publication order is illuminating, and reading them out of order is chaotic in both a fun and a frustrating manner. However, despite this not being Abe’s complete body of work, they do beautifully represent a clear progression in style and theme for their author. Though all of Abe’s novels take a raw approach to sex, that one is by far the most problematic. His most famous novel – The Woman in the Dunes – is missing from this list, in part because it has a problematic and upsetting approach to writing women and sex. All are surrealist novels, though they differ wildly in the absurdism (with The Ruined Map being the most lucid and The Box Man the most abstract).įair warning: these three novels do not represent all of Abe’s works. What we have here are three Kobo Abe novels, published in succession over ten years (from 1967 to 1977): The Ruined Map, The Box Man, and Secret Rendezvous.Īll are relatively short novels and each one has elements of the Kafkaesque in its DNA.
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