![]() Representative Sentence: “Perhaps I who have been immunized against being something fake no longer possess the capability of having the dream of a fish.” I don’t love The Box Man, but I love Abe for keeping at it beyond the necessity for resolution in the face of endless antagonism. ![]() What seems an impulsive decision leads to a series of events that strand the narrator again in an impossible continuum, like one of those Chinese finger traps populated with weird marooned characters of the sort you might find waiting in the code in an MMORPG, prodding the narrator further and further into himself only to find the hole endless. Here, a guy decides to join the quasi homeless and start living inside a box on the street. The Box Man is another great example of Abe’s ability to stretch a ridiculous premise into art. ![]() Social anxiety often appears in Abe’s work as allegory, but it’s never so temporal as to strand the reader in anything other than recognition of the submersion of the character in not only his surroundings, but his ability to parse them. Representative Sentence: “I was overcome by an impulse to stop time right there and limit the world to what I saw before me.” You don’t have to ever arrive anywhere to value the signal. Using noir tenets to draw you forward and existential passages to keep you involved, this novel, in which almost nothing ever really happens, is fascinating in how it seems to be constantly on the cusp of revealing itself until again it caves in onto a new level on the far side of the current surface. The Ruined Map is perhaps the most effective in Abe’s range of laying the mechanisms of that space bare so that you can witness how it disorients its contents spatially, temporally, and emotionally. They are constantly trying to parse their current state even as the state changes around them, tied together with images of insects, horses, maps, masks, and an overall sense of impossibility to time and land. Terrain is often both mutative and overlapping one gets the sense even in the gaps between his books that there is a code behind the language that causes his narrators to feel a continuous sense both of being lost and in search of something. Representative Sentence: “Thanks to this education, I have to experience a new sensation in order to appreciate new pain.”Ībe is a total master of making his on-paper characters operate as if they were in a video game. The first of many great examples of Abe’s amazing ability to take a bizarre, implausible situation-one that shouldn’t be able to sustain a novel-length text-and somehow make it seem as familiar as anything more largely considered “real.” Emotions are close and logically considered, fleshed in the reader in a way that makes them almost trapped in the body of the protagonist too-a labyrinth with no real gap for exit. There are few who could make such an absurd scenario seem so plausible and familiar, like squeezing humanity from a bear trap, but Abe pulls it off. There he meets a woman who seems determined to make him stay in the pit and be her husband. Ostensibly it’s about an insect collector sent on a work trip into the desert, who then becomes stranded in a city that is stuck inside a pit of quicksand. ![]() It gets very close to a feeling that I suspect many of us have had-that life is often fucked, and we are all trapped in an endless cycle of shit. Abe’s most well-known novel, and for good reason.
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