Word: kind
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...What kind of shoes do you wear on feast days?" Kob asked...
...from a vast underground military complex. In Secret Rendezvous, the labyrinth is an enormous hospital, and the unnamed protagonist's obsession is to locate his wife, who has been mysteriously carted from their home by an ambulance that no one summoned. The narrator, a salesman of jump shoes, a kind of sneakers with springs built into the soles, tells of his investigation through three assiduously-kept notebooks compiled from his own memory and from conversations taped by microphones hidden throughout the hospital. Although intending to conduct an investigation into his wife's disappearance, the salesman is told that he must...
...investigation carries him further and further into the recesses of the subterranean hospital. During his quest he encounters a veritable circus sideshow of diseased cripples and sexual freaks: the building's assistant director, a character called- "the horse," who cured his impotence through an operation turning him into a kind of centaur; the secretary who was born a test-tube baby, and so lacks any sense of human relationships; & couple who determined to safeguard their marriage by subjecting every conversation to a lie detector test; a preadolescent nymphomaniac who suffers from a disease that reduces her bones to liquid...
Both types of Vonnegut fans--the groupies who thrive on Vonnegut's simplistic reductions of life's problems into phrases like "So it goes," and those who go for his one-of-a-kind style and sarcastic commentary on life in the U.S.--will come away from Jailbird more than satisfied. And if the reader hails from within Harvard's ivy-covered walls, the sense of fulfillment will no doubt prove even more complete--Jailbird is not just another of the current rash of "life after Harvard" novels. Instead, it clearly portrays the vast dichotomy between the way the world...
...That's what I love--nobody expects you to be more than you are, you know. That kind of tolerance--I didn't know it existed. I mean if you're not equal to facing everything there...you're traitor. To the human cause, justice, humanity, the lot--there's nothing else...