Since it is not apparently meant for publication, I won’t adhere strictly to form.” And then throughout there are various nesting complexities of when and where he’s writing, that devolve into what I think they’d call “a singularity” in sci-fi terms, getting so wrapped up that the book only sorta ends. As he says after describing himself, “This report contains the results of an investigation of the above man. He’s been ordered to write about himself in the third person. In the first parts of the book, present-tense action (involving the hero writing a surveillance report on himself, in notebooks) alternate with segments containing the notebooks’ contents. Isn’t that what drives all bureaucracies? And it also occurs to me that the plot is driven, in essence, by the head hospital bureaucrat’s hard-on. Something this weird could really never be didactic, but the hospital-run-amok theme has rich enough parallels to the real world. I love anything that is hilarious, bitter, absurd, fetishy and breaks all the rules.
The ending is one of the creepier and more awful bits of surreal body-horror freakout I’ve read, and leaves the reader in an interesting frame of mind, denied “meaning,” but with a lot to think about. The hero slowly loses track of his quest to find his wife and becomes enmeshed in sexual jealousies and subplots surrounding the horse-man’s attempts to co-opt a functioning penis (he’s impotent) and use it on a 13-year-old nymphomaniac with an incurable bone disease. When he goes to look for her, he stumbles from the mundane world into a vast, half-submerged, increasingly surreal hospital complex where the patients are semi-prostitutes and a man who thinks he’s a horse is running the show. The Secret Rendezvous, by Kobo Abe is a the tale of a “jump-shoe” salesman and former nude model whose wife is taken away in an ambulance by mistake one morning. So hold onto your horse penises my friends, because this is a novel. If you can relay the “point” of a novel is in a single pithy sentence, it probably didn’t need to be written, Kundera says. Milan Kundera, writing about the novel, says that its purpose is to tell a truth that only a novel can tell–I’m paraphrasing, but the point is that a novel is a complex, non-linear vehicle for revealing complex, non-linear insights about the world that can’t be gotten at any other way.
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