Secret Rendezvous

7 hrs. 37 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Kobo Abe

Narrator Mikhail Polezhaev

Description

Kobo Abe is a brilliant star of Japan’s post-war avant-garde; his books are read around the world, adapted into films, and staged as theatre productions. A successor to the traditions of Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Alberto Moravia, a precursor of Haruki Murakami—he creates a surreal reality in every novel that reshapes the reader’s picture of the world, distorts—or clarifies—perception’s prisms, and each time completely stuns. No wonder another well-known Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe, called Abe the greatest writer in the entire history of literature…

In “A Secret Meeting,” the main character’s wife is taken to a hospital by attendants who appear from nowhere, even though she is perfectly healthy. Trying to get her back, the stunned man plunges into a hospital hell—a Kafkaesque state within a state, a surreal world inside itself—where the only way to survive is to become part of the system and play by the rules, turning a blind eye to the widespread and for everyone else familiar absurdity.