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1StevenTX
This novel has much in common with The Box Man. It is puzzling and inconclusive. It is about seeing (or listening) without being seen. Medical personnel play a major role (and one devoid of compassion), as does eroticism without affection. It is, however, a much lighter novel in tone than The Box Man. Here is my review:
Secret Rendezvous is a delightfully absurd and confounding novel. It opens with an unnamed man--all the characters in the book are nameless with the exception of one very minor character--going to an abandoned army target range where a person or creature known as "the horse" is training itself to run on four legs. The horse gives the man an assignment to conduct an investigation. The man assumes it is to investigate his own wife's disappearance. Instead, the subject of the investigation is the man himself. He is to listen to surveillance tapes the horse gives him and write a comprehensive report and analysis of his own activities over the past few days, beginning with the day his wife disappeared.
The man is a sales representative for a company making athletic shoes. One night he and his wife are awakened by the arrival of an ambulance. The medics say they have orders to take the wife to the hospital. Both she and her husband are too dumbfounded to resist, nor does it occur to the man that he should ride in the ambulance with her. He doesn't even know to which hospital they have taken her. The following morning, after questioning ambulance personnel, he finally arrives at the correct hospital and confirms with the night watchman that his wife was dropped off at the emergency entrance, but there is no record or trace of her from that point. Nor does anyone in the hospital seem to care that somewhere in the bowels of the hospital is a perfectly healthy woman, lost and confused, with no money or ID and wearing nothing but a skimpy nightgown.
The man eventually assumes the guise of a security staff member so he can explore the hospital on his own. He finds it is an immense labyrinth, more underground than above, with many wings long abandoned and buried. He also discovers that there is an obsession for eavesdropping, with every room bugged and many pieces of clothing containing hidden microphones. Related to this is the discovery that the chief specialty of the hospital--and the obsession of all of its staff--is research into sexual behavior and dysfunction.
To call Secret Rendezvous "enigmatic" would be an understatement. The novel is a labyrinth with no way out. It is absurd, entertaining, funny, erotic, and sometimes disturbing. The most pervasive element is voyeurism, with the watcher watching the watcher watching the watcher... many levels deep at some points, culminating (or maybe not?) with the reader, perplexed but amused.
Secret Rendezvous is a delightfully absurd and confounding novel. It opens with an unnamed man--all the characters in the book are nameless with the exception of one very minor character--going to an abandoned army target range where a person or creature known as "the horse" is training itself to run on four legs. The horse gives the man an assignment to conduct an investigation. The man assumes it is to investigate his own wife's disappearance. Instead, the subject of the investigation is the man himself. He is to listen to surveillance tapes the horse gives him and write a comprehensive report and analysis of his own activities over the past few days, beginning with the day his wife disappeared.
The man is a sales representative for a company making athletic shoes. One night he and his wife are awakened by the arrival of an ambulance. The medics say they have orders to take the wife to the hospital. Both she and her husband are too dumbfounded to resist, nor does it occur to the man that he should ride in the ambulance with her. He doesn't even know to which hospital they have taken her. The following morning, after questioning ambulance personnel, he finally arrives at the correct hospital and confirms with the night watchman that his wife was dropped off at the emergency entrance, but there is no record or trace of her from that point. Nor does anyone in the hospital seem to care that somewhere in the bowels of the hospital is a perfectly healthy woman, lost and confused, with no money or ID and wearing nothing but a skimpy nightgown.
The man eventually assumes the guise of a security staff member so he can explore the hospital on his own. He finds it is an immense labyrinth, more underground than above, with many wings long abandoned and buried. He also discovers that there is an obsession for eavesdropping, with every room bugged and many pieces of clothing containing hidden microphones. Related to this is the discovery that the chief specialty of the hospital--and the obsession of all of its staff--is research into sexual behavior and dysfunction.
To call Secret Rendezvous "enigmatic" would be an understatement. The novel is a labyrinth with no way out. It is absurd, entertaining, funny, erotic, and sometimes disturbing. The most pervasive element is voyeurism, with the watcher watching the watcher watching the watcher... many levels deep at some points, culminating (or maybe not?) with the reader, perplexed but amused.
2lilisin
I have finished Secret Rendezvous just now which was simultaneously mesmerizing and confounding, fairly typical of Abe. Having turned the last page, I started thinking about what it was I had just read and what it all meant and I found that to understand this book, I had to compare it to other Abe works. Thus, my review might turn more into an essay as I compare it briefly to Face of Another and The Box Man. Although I don't believe Abe really has "spoilers" as he does not write in a traditional way, I do warn that this review(/essay) will refer to specific plot points and will offer my idea of what the book is about, which might skew your own thoughts if you choose to read the book yourself. If you do decide to continue reading, I hope you find what will probably become a rambling, interesting.
5) Kobo Abe : Secret Rendezvous
Japan
4.5/5 stars (tentative)
The back of the book and most other internet users will summarize the book as such: An ambulance arrives uncalled in the middle of the night to take away a man's wife despite her claims that she is perfectly fine. The unnamed protagonist is left to find her, but when he arrives at the hospital things are atypical of a hospital visit. In his attempt to find his wife, the man becomes employed by a horse as chief of security and tunnels his way through the labyrinth of a hospital to find her. As he searches, he becomes entwined with slues of strange characters, voyeur to sexual experiments and falls to a sort of mental manipulation. The quote on the back of the book states that this is Abe's "nightmarish vision of modern medicine and modern life". Others on the internet appreciate the feel of the novel but some are not quite sure what they have just read.
This is where I look at his other works to understand, or at least, to attempt.
Abe, as I have come to understand him, likes to write about identity and the preservation of, or, destruction of identity within and outside the parameters of society. With Face of Another he explored the idea of the face and the face's physical influence on identity. When the character's face was destroyed, he was left to either rebuild his same face and recreate his once persona, or build a new face and attempt to create a new persona. But it was up to society to decide which persona was allowed to come out. In The Box Man, Abe once again explored the idea of identity when the character wished to escape the eyes of society and limit his world to that of a box. Initially he was doing fine until society knocked on his box trying to shake him out of what was considered un-society-like, thus creating a character trying to kill him. Secret Rendezvous is really just a retelling of these similar themes.
Presentation of the book as a series of notebooks.
The wife.
A character set to kill the main character or to shake him and bring him back into the eyes of "regular" society.
An enclosure where the character is constantly running, escaping.
All in all it comes to the same. The character, once a working member of society, has fallen prey to some sort of accident. In this case, an incident based on self repression of sexual thought due to wanting to fit into societal norms despite a strong sexual appetite. As often happens when people fall ill to what is considered atypical and not part of the norm, he becomes an outcast and starts to fall more into delinquency until in the end, he loses his own identity. And the book is his quest to find it and to return to normal (represented by his wife, who has most likely left him in real life). However, in his quest to find himself he just progressively loses himself even more until the hospital remains this perpetual labyrinth where toilets turn into secret passageways and festivals are actually secret plots and elevators don't seem to go to the second floor. Abe gives many hints to the reader about where reality is to be found. He often quotes "Doctors make the best patients and patients the best doctors", and just like the horse tells the man (as the protagonist is called) that the secret of his dilemma lies in the first part of the tapes he has to listen to, the secret of the book likes in the first page: the realistic introduction of the characters and his hobbies as might be written in the page of a doctor's notebook. More importantly, the notebook of a doctor based in psychiatry. And the notebooks of the character are really an attempt by the doctor to find the source of his patient's problems by having the patient investigate himself.
With this I just find it truly amazing what Abe can present. At the same time, presenting the downfall of a character while showing the limitations of a society when presented with the extremes of society's pleasures, in this case, sexual desire. In the wanting of society to dumb down and bring modesty to sexual desire and lust, and the wanting of science to understand where it comes from, both lose their ability to see it as its most basic form. And when something becomes taboo, extremes are formed which causes even more confusion and desire.
So Abe's ability to show how identity shapes society and vice versa is just remarkable and it's what makes me such a fan. I can't wait till the next one.
-------
This is my interpretation of this book and the other two books by Abe. It is hard for me to write this out simply because I can't seem to find any other user who has come to the same interpretation as I really do think this is what it is.
Steven -
I would love to discuss this one with you if you still remember enough of the book.
5) Kobo Abe : Secret Rendezvous
Japan
4.5/5 stars (tentative)
The back of the book and most other internet users will summarize the book as such: An ambulance arrives uncalled in the middle of the night to take away a man's wife despite her claims that she is perfectly fine. The unnamed protagonist is left to find her, but when he arrives at the hospital things are atypical of a hospital visit. In his attempt to find his wife, the man becomes employed by a horse as chief of security and tunnels his way through the labyrinth of a hospital to find her. As he searches, he becomes entwined with slues of strange characters, voyeur to sexual experiments and falls to a sort of mental manipulation. The quote on the back of the book states that this is Abe's "nightmarish vision of modern medicine and modern life". Others on the internet appreciate the feel of the novel but some are not quite sure what they have just read.
This is where I look at his other works to understand, or at least, to attempt.
Abe, as I have come to understand him, likes to write about identity and the preservation of, or, destruction of identity within and outside the parameters of society. With Face of Another he explored the idea of the face and the face's physical influence on identity. When the character's face was destroyed, he was left to either rebuild his same face and recreate his once persona, or build a new face and attempt to create a new persona. But it was up to society to decide which persona was allowed to come out. In The Box Man, Abe once again explored the idea of identity when the character wished to escape the eyes of society and limit his world to that of a box. Initially he was doing fine until society knocked on his box trying to shake him out of what was considered un-society-like, thus creating a character trying to kill him. Secret Rendezvous is really just a retelling of these similar themes.
Presentation of the book as a series of notebooks.
The wife.
A character set to kill the main character or to shake him and bring him back into the eyes of "regular" society.
An enclosure where the character is constantly running, escaping.
All in all it comes to the same. The character, once a working member of society, has fallen prey to some sort of accident. In this case, an incident based on self repression of sexual thought due to wanting to fit into societal norms despite a strong sexual appetite. As often happens when people fall ill to what is considered atypical and not part of the norm, he becomes an outcast and starts to fall more into delinquency until in the end, he loses his own identity. And the book is his quest to find it and to return to normal (represented by his wife, who has most likely left him in real life). However, in his quest to find himself he just progressively loses himself even more until the hospital remains this perpetual labyrinth where toilets turn into secret passageways and festivals are actually secret plots and elevators don't seem to go to the second floor. Abe gives many hints to the reader about where reality is to be found. He often quotes "Doctors make the best patients and patients the best doctors", and just like the horse tells the man (as the protagonist is called) that the secret of his dilemma lies in the first part of the tapes he has to listen to, the secret of the book likes in the first page: the realistic introduction of the characters and his hobbies as might be written in the page of a doctor's notebook. More importantly, the notebook of a doctor based in psychiatry. And the notebooks of the character are really an attempt by the doctor to find the source of his patient's problems by having the patient investigate himself.
With this I just find it truly amazing what Abe can present. At the same time, presenting the downfall of a character while showing the limitations of a society when presented with the extremes of society's pleasures, in this case, sexual desire. In the wanting of society to dumb down and bring modesty to sexual desire and lust, and the wanting of science to understand where it comes from, both lose their ability to see it as its most basic form. And when something becomes taboo, extremes are formed which causes even more confusion and desire.
So Abe's ability to show how identity shapes society and vice versa is just remarkable and it's what makes me such a fan. I can't wait till the next one.
-------
This is my interpretation of this book and the other two books by Abe. It is hard for me to write this out simply because I can't seem to find any other user who has come to the same interpretation as I really do think this is what it is.
Steven -
I would love to discuss this one with you if you still remember enough of the book.
3StevenTX
lilisin - I've read your review through several times, and it's helping bring back some of my impressions from the novel. I'm sure identity is a major theme in all of his writing, as you say. Perhaps it is less so in Kangaroo Notebook which, maybe by no coincidence, was the one I enjoyed least.
Reality is kind of the obverse of identity, being how we perceive that which is outside ourselves rather than what is inside, and there is much of that theme in Abe as well. And there is always the sense of voyeurism--wanting to observe without being observed or taking part, as though to distance oneself from reality.
I recently read Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin, which deals with multiple layers of false reality much as Abe might. I need to read more by both authors, but from what I've read so far they seem quite similar.
Reality is kind of the obverse of identity, being how we perceive that which is outside ourselves rather than what is inside, and there is much of that theme in Abe as well. And there is always the sense of voyeurism--wanting to observe without being observed or taking part, as though to distance oneself from reality.
I recently read Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin, which deals with multiple layers of false reality much as Abe might. I need to read more by both authors, but from what I've read so far they seem quite similar.
4rebeccanyc
Well, I just succumbed and ordered this book, although after my last Abe I thought I'd never read any more!
