Secret Rendezvous
Malin, Irving
ity than such a pioneer venture could warrant: But I am glad that they were produced and have been published under Through fantasies to SECRET RENDEZVOUS Kobo Abe Translated by Juliet Winters...
...we cannot take hold of one person or event or object and call itreal The novel outmaneuvers us...
...The initially dispassionate reader will come to agree, at least emotionally, with Congressman Pete McCloskey, who said after a 1975 visit to Phnom Penh, "If I could have found the military or State Department leader who has been the architect of this policy, my instinct would be to string him up...
...There is another turn--another part of the labyrinth...
...MARY PERKINS RYAN is the editor of PACE (Professional Approaches for Christian Educators), published by St...
...He makes us work (as readers and believers...
...He is coeditor of The Achievement of William Styron (Georgia University Press), among others...
...He deliberately mingles fear and pleasure to force us toward a non-official auspices as a many-sided contribution to serious thought and discussion about "faith and sexism...
...He offers few glib sermons...
...It is a tale of unmitigated cruelty: the cruelty of Khmer Rouge soldiers (mostly teenagers) who chop up and disembowel their enemies and display their severed heads on a table...
...IRVING M),LIN teaches at CCNY...
...In brief SIDESHOW: KISSINGER, NIXON AND THE DESTRUCTION OF CAMBODIA,by William Shawcross, Simon and Schuster, $13.95, 467 pp., Pocket Books, $2.95...
...By isolating the salesman and the reader, Abe suggests that only by accepting an underlying pattern to existence, can we conclude (or even begin) our earthly endeavors...
...Abe is, thus, giving us a violent and nightmarish work...
...We are, therefore, put into a mirror-p0sition with the salesman...
...The "secret rendezvous" is, in one way, the unforeseen meeting with fate, destiny, REVIEWERS MARGARET WIMSATr lives in New Haven, Connecticut...
...She disappears into an odd, mul#structured hospital--it is clinic, torture-garden, anal "home"in which nothing~j~or everything) appears planned...
...and the cruelty of American policy-makers-Nixon and Kissinger--who could not see their victims but--acting out the .Nixon "madman theory of war" (calculated to keep opponents off balance) and dedicated to the mystique of bombing as a show of manly strength--carried out the secret and illegal bombing and.dis,astrous invasion that brought on Cambodia's internal collapse...
...within the "notebool~s'" are charts, banks of information, and clues...
...divine order--that final encounter by which we understand the meaning of our past and present "somersaults...
...Mary of the West Seminary in Norwood, Ohio...
...He resembles Kafka in this respect (and many...
...His secretary was a test-tube baby...
...what they have done to the country is greater evil than we have done to any country in the world, and wholly without reason, except for 21 December 1979:729...
...FATHER RAYMOND A. SCHROTH, S.J., formerly associate editor of Commonweal, is now academic dean of Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Missouri...
...she cannot show many human feelings...
...like the hospital (or the narrator's mind) it is full of deceptions, conceits, and reflections-and it suggests that "reality itself" --that is, the world outside of the fiction-world is ultimately inexplicable...
...But the very beauty and toughness of his novel lies in its refusal to take the easy road...
...Any university or trustee thinking of nominating Henry Kissinger for an honorary degree (probably to get a "celebrity" for graduation) -- indeed, anyone who still thinks Kissinger worthy of a shred of respect -- should read Sideshow, this painful story of how Cambodia has become, in Hanoi's truthful words, " . . . a land soaked with blood and t e a r s . . . heIl on earth...
...faith philosophical position...
...When he looks for her, he encounters various disturbing obstacles...
...JI'he security guards are deliberate (.9), fascists...
...His hero is a salesman of jogging shoes...
...If we assume that the salesman is offering a sane account of an insane hospital (world), then we are shaken by the cruel pattern of the labyrinth...
...The assistant director is, for example, a centaur-like creature who can be potent only after a body-graft...
...He writes a testament, a document of faith, even when he seems to mock belief in all solutions...
...They are described at" length--the novel perversely exaggerates objects...
...walls, shoes, bodies and notebooks are made to dominate the world--and they make us assume that the salesman can turn everywhere with great ease...
...others): he paradoxically affirms the hidden order of the universe by dwelling on secret, ominous, ghostly passageways...
...FATHER EUGENE H. MALY is a membefof the faculty of Mt...
...I do not mean to imply that Abe is a "salesman" of faith...
...The fictional structure is a labyrinth, a "secret rendezvous" of science and poetry...
...ls.ving Malin K OBO ABE refuses to write a conventional novel...
...the salesman discovers finally that the perverse roles--his wife is at one point the Masked Woman in a scary, funny festival to celebrate the hospital's founding--and insane transformations are the underlying pattern...
...He is the author of The Eagle and Brooklyn (Greenwood Press...
...If we assume that the salesman imagines the hospital, the disappearance and reappearance of his wife etc., then we are reading an obsessive projection of a fantasy (or series of fantasies...
...ity than such a pioneer venture could warrant: But I am glad that they were produced and have been published under Through fantasies to SECRET RENDEZVOUS Kobo Abe Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter Knopf, $8.95, 179 pp...
...The hospital is suggestively made up of sex and violence...
...He gives us a series of "notebooks" (and epilogue...
...These shoes enable him to do' 'effortless somersaults without a flying start, like a trampoline acrobat...
...But the salesman discovers that he can barely find his wife (and his feelings about their marriage...
...Mary's Press, Winona, Minnesota...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 23
