Word: secretly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Yasunari Kawabata) have committed suicide. The irony, 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...
...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'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...
...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...
...grotesqueness of its images entirely alienate the reader. Apart from the initial shock of meeting Abe's characters, there is little else besides some black humor; the reader is left stunned, unable to identify with the narrator or to place the story in a familiar or meaningful perspective. Secret Rendezvous leaves the reader provoked, but unmoved, and while he must respect the profundity of Abe's vision, the novel does not convince him to share...
...Helms' efforts spanned the globe--from Chile to Cuba to the Congo to Southeast Asia to Italy and Eastern Europe, and always, always, to the USSR: anticommunism is the lifeblood of the CIA. In 1977 Helms explained what had worried him most as CIA director--not fighting secret wars, not overturning free elections, not the press, not Watergate, but..."The CIA is the only intelligence service in the Western world which has never been penetrated by the KGB. That's what I worried about...