You know, most of the classifications I see of this novel are things like literary fiction, or classics, but to me it reads as straight-up horror. Literary horror, verging on the surrealist, but still. An entomologist goes to the beach for a long weekend, searching for beetles. The tiny local village he stops at for the night kidnaps him, and he's left in a house at the bottom of a hole in the sand, with no companion but a local woman as essentially nameless as himself. The sand dunes around them are enormous, and they - like half the households in the village - can only survive at the bottom of these holes by constant shoveling. The sand looms over them, it gets in everything, it's part of food and flesh and sex, and initially the man rebels and tries to escape, but the sand sucks him in, and by the end he's trapped himself, broken down and obsessive, the sand his entire life. The whole thing's a meditation on hopelessness, on the waste of a life spent on mindless, repetitive labour and small inanities, and it's weird and depressing and terrifying.

It is also no surprise to me that the author, apparently, is a fan of Kafka. Believe me, it shows.