Word: abely
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...might have been Walt Disney World, which lay just across a grimy interstate. Outside the hotel where the happening occurred, giant hot-air balloons wafted under a blazing autumn sun. Dixieland bands strutted down walkways, and characters in Indian headdresses, space-shuttle caps and Abe Lincoln garb wandered about. Under an Australian pine by a swimming pool, a stocky old gentleman in a rumpled blue suit discoursed on farm policy. He said his name was Harold Stassen and he was once again running for President...
...fact, some of our Cube graduates have become monuments in American society. Abe Lincoln, pictured to the right, never wrote for the Cube; but if he had his statue might not have been hidden on the porch of a building...
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...
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...
...unless a lot is lost in translation, Abe's new novel is closer to outright farce: the crudeness and 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...