Word: man
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...fair, Vonnegut overdoes it at times. Walter Starbuck, a typical Vonnegut face-in-the-crowd personality, has gone to Harvard in the 1930s largely because of family connections with a Harvard man. His most vivid memories are of Harvard, and everyone he meets has had a memorably bad experience with a Harvard graduate. Harvard has given Starbuck a one-way ticket to the top, but it hasn't put out the net to catch him when he falls. And he does fall, of course, only to be thrust on the escalator again by the omnipresent invisible hand that...
...them officially at last by me, the white woman--the final meaning of a day they had lived I had no knowledge of, a day of other appalling things, violence, disasters, urgencies, deprivations which suddenly would become, was nothing but what it had led up to: the man among them beating their donkey. I could have put a stop to it, the misery; at that point I witnessed. What more...
Rosa's frustration is the white man's burden in South Africa. Their guilt, anger and fear creates an emotional chasm between races far more disturbing than the state-imposed physical separation. Blacks reject the whites who rejected them, and both are disenfranchised...