Secret Rendezvous By Author’s Name

The hospital is a labyrinth of human depravity. A man wanders through it searching for his wife, constantly assaulted by odd and insane sights, sounds, and people. Written with mind piercing clarity and description.

Two years ago, I decided to pick up a bunch of Rick Bass, as I’d read The Watch in college and a handful of uncollected stories in graduate school, but little more, yet there was much moreover by him out there in the world. I was sorely disappointed.

This summer, I noted I had a few Kobo Abe books on my Read shelves, and that I’d had a fascination with him in the 90s, but I could barely remember any of them. So this experiment has been to come back to titles, possibly as new experiences.

This one, along with others, have proven disappointments as well. I don’t know if part of the problem is dating—these are novels from the 50s to 70s, and I feel often that there are premises here that are worked just to establish the premise itself rather than explore and engage further, as a more contemporary writer would do. I don’t see a lot of credit given to Abe as a pioneer, and I think comparisons to Kafka are way thin for reasons above, but he certainly carries a lot of accolades for his work. Part of me wants to chalk up some of my problems to translation, as the writing is at times a struggle to get through, but there is of course also the possibility that accolade judges are sometimes rather short-minded (and frankly not very well read). That’s mean, but I find myself wondering if I just wanted to be impressed with Abe thirty years ago and ultimately found little to nothing to cling to here.

Unless you are a die hard fan of Kobo Abe, you might want to pass on this one. Eccentric, phantasmagorical, somewhat smutty, and Kafkaeque it is, but for me it was also fundamentally lacking in dramatic tension. Such humour as there was, I had to disinter carefully from its shallow, cliched grave.

Ich dachte, mit den Känguruhheften den hypnotischsten Alptraum von Abe gelesen zu haben, mit einem traumatisierenden Ende. Doch Secret Rendevous schlägt nochmal zu. Eines Morgens holt ein Krankenwagen, obwohl sich keiner erinnert, einen gerufen zu haben, die Frau des Mannes ab. Der Mann begibt sich folglich zum Krankenhaus, um der Sache nachzugehen. Doch schon der Eintritt ist anders: Er muss in einem Laden die Erlaubnis kaufen. Dies mag schon ein Hinweis sein, denn danach wird es immer verworrener und faszinierender. Im Auftrag eines Arztes, der durch seine Impotenz zu einer radikalen OP gezwungen war (er ist ein menschl. Pferd), schreibt er in Berichtheften das Erlebte auf, doch die Forschungen führen immer weiter in den Irrgarten, voller Perversionen und Verbrechen. Ein kleines sexsüchtiges Mädchen, dessen Knochen sich auflösen, eine Truppe Karateschläger, Experimente mit Geschlechtsteilen, bis hin zu einem unglaublichen Ende. Man mag das Buch nicht aus der Hand legen, obwohl es andere wohl weit von sich werfen würden.

From the very start of this short, but densely labyrinthine and surreally intense novel, you know that you’re in strange territory. An ambulance comes unbidden in the middle of the night, spirits away a man’s perfectly healthy wife, and he’s left to begin a Kafkaesque search to find out what’s become of her in a hospital whose nightmarish bureaucracy is concealing a bizarre and ominous program of sex research.

Abe has the rare talent of making even the most outlandish situations seem perfectly plausible and that’s what lends *Secret Rendezvous* its riveting sense of psychological truth and subjective terror. Like a powerful myth, there’s something more *real* than real about the protagonist’s endlessly frustrating search, his alternating states of inexplicable omnipotence and paralyzing impotence, his longing to find his missing wife and his fear of doing so.

Like Robbe-Grillet, Abe is a master of moody erotic dread and the hint of horrors forever just out of view. Unlike Robbe-Grillet, Abe’s storyline, though fractured, is not obsessively repetitive; though detailed, it’s not frozen in time–events move forward towards a conclusion that, although ambiguous, nevertheless seems eerily inevitable.

Explicit, often shocking, never purely prurient, and, at times, even surprisingly funny, *Secret Rendezvous* is a disturbing and thought-provoking novel by a writer who strikes me as one of the most under-appreciated of the 20th century. His sexually-charged themes and dark insights into psychological dilemmas flatly without resolution make a point about the problematic nature of the human condition that is not easily assimilated to a culture that still believes in solutions…in fact, that still believes in the concept of `humanity’ at all.

Perhaps, that makes Abe more relevant now than ever.