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This Book Transformed My View On Work/Life Balance!
I am a member of a book group that meets once every two months. The group takes a pretty diverse view of the world of literature and has read figures ranging from Toni Morrison to Henry James, via Carson McCullers and JG Ballard. The one rule is that the books should be in some way considered ‘classic’ — they shouldn’t be throwaway books that you read for pleasure; there has to be an element of eating-your-vegetables.
Anyhow, meandering intro aside, last month I found myself reading Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes. This is not really a novel that you can spoil — it is a book about existential dread in which very little happens, slowly — but the following paragraphs will introduce you to some of the key ideas of the book. So if you’re an anti-spoiler obsessive perhaps click away now (you could try this podcast instead, for example).
The book is set in Japan, I guess, but that’s not super relevant. It is, in short, the story of a man holidaying in a desert area near the coast, who finds himself trapped in a hole. He cannot free himself, and he lives down there with a woman who desperately needs his help with digging away the sands that, day-by-day, encroach upon them. He faces either complying with the back-breaking work imposed by his captors, or facing the reality of being crushed alive by the weight of sand. He spends, of course, much of the book conspiring to escape, but is driven slowly into a sort-of deranged ennui. He keeps shovelling and ultimately realises that he’s either stuck in a literal hole or a metaphorical one; freedom is not a reality for him.
And yes, this book made me think about the work/life balance!
It made me think about how crazy my brain is for even drawing this parallel. The Woman in the Dunes is a metaphor for existence and for the illusory nature of freedom (just as Sisyphus, as far back as the ancient Greeks, has existed as a symbol of the relentless toil, reset and failure of life) so it’s not that much of a reach for me to start reading my own life into it, but I found myself particularly compelled by it as an anti-self-help book. A rage at the futility of work. A diatribe against trying to find meaning, of ascribing agency to the act of labour.
