Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...book's commercial value is an added bonus, not something for "serious readers" to turn up their noses at. Thompsons' latest work is psychobiography, whodunit and courtroom drama tied into one, and fused by the enigmatic Sobhraj. The author says he is now at work on his first novel. One can only hope his imagination yields a subject as gripping as the real world...
...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...
...style has much in common with the fantasy of Kafka, Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; as in Kafka's The Castle and Lem's Memoir's Found in a Bathtub, Abe's new novel presents a protagonist thrust into an absurd, alien environment with a mission he must accomplish. In the former, a gentlemen K., claiming to be a land surveyor, sets out to reach the castle, while Lem's memoir-writer must wander through endless corridors to escape from a vast underground military complex. In Secret Rendezvous, the labyrinth is an enormous hospital, and the unnamed protagonist...
...this is little indication of the truly morbid turn the novel will take as the narrator's 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...
What, indeed, is the point of all this? Why does Abe depict people as freaks and reduce their motivations to a series of mechanical and sexual impulses? If, as the author once said, this novel is "a parable of city life," then it appears that we are a society of sick helping the sick. Abe, who holds a medical degree but has never practiced, breaks all human relations down into physician-patient relationships where, as "the horse" acknowledges, "Doctors are cruel, and patients endure their cruelty...that's the law of survival." It is not an appealing view of human...