What is the Meaning of This? 8 Absurdist Fiction Books

Office worker Candace Chan doesn’t like her job much. After a disease spreads, turning otherwise free-thinking people into people who mindlessly act out their daily routines until they die, Candace tries to find meaning in her life along with fellow survivors of the still-spreading disease.

Told through alternative perspectives, Kafka on the Shore follows the stories of 15-year-old Kafka and elderly Nakata. Kafka is a runaway in search of his mother and his sister. Nakata, who suffered a strange incident in the woods as a child, now finds lost cats. The two stories intertwine in an exploration of life and the meaning of it.

Thirty-six-year-old Keiko has worked at Smile Mart since she was 18, reasoning it’s the only way for her to be “normal” after growing up feeling like an outsider. She spends her years following the Smile Mart manual and mirroring her coworkers to blend in with society. Her family, though, is pushing her to find a partner, a real career, and settle down.

After a lifetime of chronic pain, Mary is suffocating under medical bills and procedures that don’t ever seem to help for long. When a Craigslist ad catches her eye, she ends up part of the Girlfriend Experiment for a rich celebrity. The Answers deals with questions of personhood and love in the face of research trying to break these things down into disparate parts.

Narrator, called A, deals with the strange behavior of her roommate, B, and goes to work at her proofreading job, watching commercials by the dozen and searching for something to make her happy. A becomes fixated on Kandy Kakes, on local celebrities, on anything that might be the thing. But what if there is no cure for this feeling of always needing something more?

Orlando follows Orlando, part of the English nobility in the 16th century, for hundreds of years. He flits in and out of favor with royalty, undergoes a sex change, and deals with heartbreak time and time again. Outside of the confines of time and gender, Orlando shows how contradictory and disarming life can be.

Gregor Samsa works as a salesman to support his parents and sister until he wakes up one day as a gigantic cockroach. Horrified at his new appearance and finding his role in the family gone now that he cannot make money, Gregor struggles to cope, as do his family members.

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born with an intense sense of smell. Despite a rough childhood as an orphan, he finds a job as a perfumer in France, where he grows more and more obsessed with recreating smells. After smelling a young girl, he goes off the rails in pursuit of the perfect scent.