Word: books
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps Geoffrey's brother at last exposed the real Duke, a fumbling, impotent, useless human being, unworthy of eulogy, much less a 270-page memorial. But this stinking jailbird did not bring up Geoffrey. The book is not about the real Duke, but the Duke of Deception, the father who raised a son "to be happier than he had been, to do better." Evidently he accomplished that goal and for that Geoffrey Wolff offers his compassion and his gratitude.Geoffrey Wolff and his children...
...however, is that for the leading literary figure in Japan, Abe's writing has a remarkably Western flavor. Except for place names and a few distinctly oriental metaphors ("his thoughts shrank like a piece of fat meat plunged into boiling water"), Secret Rendezvous. Abe's sixth and most recent book could pass, like his others, for a Western novel...
...doctors are voyeurs. What is the hospital administration doing during all this? Sponsoring orgasm fests and tape-recording the prodigious sexual activity taking place throughout the building, in order to market those tapes as aphrodisiacs for the public. This is no ordinary hospital. But then, this is no ordinary book...
Secret Rendezvous is a gruesome book, and a grueling book, but not a great one. Many of its ideas are not new; the existential themes of man's isolation and sickness date from as far back as The Woman in the Dunes (1964), Abe's first novel and still his most popular in the West. The weakness of Secret Rendezvous lies not in its ideas, which were presented successfully in Abe's first book but in its format. In adopting the medium of fantasy, an author hopes to convince the reader not with the poignant accuracy of his images...
Kurt Vonnegut's perennial semi-autobiographical protagonist returns this time as Walter F. Starbuck, and he is a Harvard man. He is so much a Harvard man, in fact, that were Vonnegut less obvious in writing his titles this book might well be called Kilgore Trout Goes to Harvard. Vonnegut's hero still peacefully accepts life's highs and lows, but Harvard has changed him: the lows seem a little lower, the highs a little higher, and the accepting a little harder...