![]() ![]() ![]() 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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