Tamires Cavalcanti Cavalcanti itibaren Mont-Saint-Michel, Francja itibaren Mont-Saint-Michel, Francja

Kobo Abe’s last novel feels like the Alice in Wonderland of a middle-aged man. When radish sprouts begin growing from the narrator’s legs, he seeks help at a hospital, where his bed suddenly takes him for a wild ride into a world of hallucinations. The book’s title stems from a mock business proposal in which our narrator randomly wrote down the words “Kangaroo Notebook” and was eagerly met by his associates to develop the idea of this notebook. Throughout the story pop in images of marsupials. More vivid are the death-themed deliriums, especially when the narrator floats into an underworld that consists of demon-children in limbo who are chanting for help—turns out, even more bizarrely, that their chanting is a sort of sketch put on for tourists. Throughout his surreal journey, he keeps getting “saved” by the woman who was his original nurse at the hospital, though she pops into the book in different personas. Kangaroo Notebook is a novel of atmosphere and description. Its symbolism is open for interpretation—you can either read it for its entertainment value without trying to overanalyze it, or you can treat it like a puzzle, deciphering every event’s symbolic meaning. For me it was a combination. I was taken by the premise, though not entirely absorbed.