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Kobo abe book3/5/2023 But Abe’s flavor of weirdness, which nobody has yet replicated, is pungent indeed. His novels, at least the eight currently available in English translation, mix a pinch of weirdness into a grayish medium of the mundane, the concrete and the scientific. But Abe’s are relatively slim, aesthetically spare volumes, untainted by baroque language and puerile impulses toward fantasy. What’s more, Abe would seem to replace the relative asexuality of those books with grim, elaborate perversion. If Abe’s body of work has room for an image like that, where exactly are its boundaries? If you’re unfamiliar with the man’s books, I’d forgive you for imagining the heaving epics of an undisciplined maximalist, novels where ridiculousness piles upon grotesquerie until both text and reader collapse. It accommodates an impotent hospital director who grafts the severed lower half of a well-endowed underling to his own back in order to transform himself into a sexually superpowered centaur and thus better pleasure a blob-like thirteen-year-old girl bedridden by her slowly dissolving bones.Īlready, the mind reels. It accommodates lengthy philosophical ruminations on identity, self-image and the loss or fragmentation thereof. Kobo Abe’s misshapen world accommodates the corny tropes of thriller, adventure and detective fiction.
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