Five notable books on missing persons and absent figures

Heidi Julavits's novels are The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, The Mineral Palace, and The Vanishers.

For the Wall Street Journal, she named a five best list of books on missing persons and absent figures, including:

The Woman in the Dunes
by Kobo Abe (1962)

The first chapter of Abe's novel is the equivalent of a missing-person report—an amateur entomologist has disappeared while on a seaside holiday. After seven years the authorities pronounce him dead. His case is closed. The reader soon learns, however, that a slightly worse fate has befallen this poor entomologist. He is alive and, seemingly for the foreseeable future, trapped with a strange woman at the bottom of a sandy hole. Escape attempts are fouled by collapsing sand walls and local law enforcement patrolling the dunes. The term "gritty realism" was wasted on 1970s minimalists like Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie. Kobo Abe's literally gritty realism—he is tirelessly attentive to sand in hair, eyes, food, ears, shoes, socks, sheets, water—evokes a grueling existence from which escape, even of the psychological detachment variety (as in Carver and Beattie), is impossible. His absurdist conceit—a man and a woman trapped in a hole, working incessantly to prevent sand from burying them alive—keenly echoes the struggles of the modern Everyperson, those with above-ground homes.

Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue