That it just won't be, I realized even before I started reading the book. Actually, as soon as I read the phrase from the introductory article by N. Fedorenko: "Kobo Abe is an artist of conscious, deliberate encryption, a writer of allegorical meaning and satirical colors. In his works - a colorful world of artistic illusion. Even to understand the phrase itself took some effort. What's in the book itself, then? True, there was hope that they were lying in their introductory articles. There were precedents when the book was absolutely not about what the introductory article warned about. But, not this time.
Kōbō Abe (安部 公房 Abe Kōbō), pseudonym of Kimifusa Abe, was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer, and inventor. He was the son of a doctor and studied medicine at Tokyo University. He never practised however, giving it up to join a literary group that aimed to apply surrealist techniques to Marxist ideology. Abe has been often compared to Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society and his modernist sensibilities.
Although, everything seemed to make for comfortable reading. The font is large, only 200 pages, and it is not written in "hieroglyphics" as I had feared. A chemist, the main character, on whose behalf the story is told, was injured during one of the experiments in his laboratory. Nothing seemingly serious, but part of his face was burned and disfigured by colloidal burns. It was as if nothing had changed in his life, he still went to work and lived his old life, but it was as if a wall had appeared between him and those around him. No, he is not shunned or poked at, the laboratory staff where he is in charge is delicate, his wife has not run away from him screaming, but he still feels that ever since his face has been hidden behind bandages, everything around him has been different. Not the same as before. It's as if he's been taken outside society and society doesn't want him back. So he began to think about making a mask. That's what the whole narrative revolves around.
"My very fate - the loss of my face that made me turn to the help of this mask - is not something out of the ordinary at all - it is rather the common fate of modern people. ... My despair was not so much due to the loss of my face as to the fact that my fate had nothing to do with the fate of others.
To begin with, for more than a third of the book the hero tells the reader about the characteristics of faces according to various classifications. Temperaments, constructions. The agony of choosing a face type for one's mask is straight out of a scientific article, honestly. And the article is from the field of mathematics with statistics.
"I thought I had a pretty clear picture unfolding before me. To choose from four or two is a big difference. Four is not just two and two, it contains six combinations. Thus, I was able to reduce my work to one sixth. Besides, the two remaining types represented the direct opposite of each other: it was absolutely impossible to mistake one for the other. Only through experimental modeling, which is what I am doing, will I be able to find out which face I need. For a while I went into a comparative study of the two types of face.
Then there's a few pages of detailed information about which chemical materials to use to make this mask, so that it would be flexible and reflect facial expressions. And to fit snugly and all sorts of other details. Then how he made it... It wasn't strange that I wanted to do anything but return to this tedious narrative.
It wasn't until the middle of the book that I started to "catch the author's wave. However, it took complete concentration on the text to stay on it. I was distracted and the wave slipped away, and I had to go back and reread. I found quotations that I wanted to write down urgently, because they were so impressive and profound. And the part devoted to the description of the relationship of the hero and his beloved, between whom there was a wall of silence after the misfortune that happened to him, in general, struck me with the tragedy of its insolubility.
In general, the book seems to rest on the relationship with his wife, which lacks understanding. But which of them erected a wall of incomprehension - a big question. Everything is not at all as it seems from the hero's words. Perhaps that was the author's idea, to show how little people understand each other, how differently even the closest people think. This experiment with his mask... What was the first thing he was going to do? It is incomprehensible, and how could such a thing come into his head at all. And how could it have occurred to him that it would work? I'd better not tell you any more, or I'll tell you the whole story. But in general, men's brains definitely have a different structure. That's it, I'll shut up.
Sometimes philosophical reflections of the hero admired the novelty of the definitions of familiar objects and relationships. When the author described an abstract world in which everyone acquires a mask, or even more than one, an unimaginably striking analogy with the Internet arose. It is simply incredible how accurately he described the many things that would be characteristic of a world in which people, all without exception, hide behind masks, and what we have now, when people come out into the "ether" from pages called by other names, wearing the masks they like best... yes he described almost everything! It's genius. But sometimes he gave away things that made one doubt that he himself understood what he had written:
"Intimacy may perhaps be called the sexual domain of abstract human relations. If one confines oneself to a too distant, abstract relationship that even the imagination cannot encompass, the other person inevitably becomes an abstract antipode--an enemy--and sexual opposition becomes intimacy. For example, since there is an abstract woman, a man's eroticism is obligatory, inevitable. Eroticism can by no means be the enemy of woman, as is usually thought, on the contrary: it is woman who is the enemy of eroticism. Consequently, it is logical, apparently, to assume that intimacy is not a perverted sexuality, but, on the contrary, a typical form of the current sexual life." What?
The reading is like trying to swallow something rough. The mind all the time balances on the edge of understanding and not understanding the author's thoughts, all the time on the limit of concentration and therefore quickly gets tired and begins to refuse to perceive the underlying meaning, sliding on the surface of the lines, if not completely disconnected.
It amused me when the main character, waiting for his wife to return, after leaving her his diaries to read, counted down the time she needed to read them: 1 page in a minute, 60 pages in an hour. She should be here by now... From personal experience, I would not give my spouse less than a week in his place.
That's not the main thing, though. The main thing is that his wife, with whom he, frankly speaking, did not act decently, gave him and all his notes a clear formulation with which I could not disagree: they are the notes of an egoist, "...confessions endless, like a snake that has caught itself by the tail."
This article was sponsored by Robert Welch
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