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[COMPLETE] Cleanup: Secret Rendezvous
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Bump once again.This thread is officially more than 6 months old.
Hi Drace. #s 1-5 are all okay, but had to skip 6 as I'm not familiar with invalidating editions.
Thank you for your help. Details on how to mark a book invalid are here: https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/...
Drace wrote: "Bumping again for invalidations in #6."Done!
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Books mentioned in this topic
Secret Rendezvous (other topics)Secret Rendezvous (other topics)
Secret Rendezvous (other topics)
Secret Rendezvous (other topics)
Secret Rendezvous (other topics)
1. First English Hardcover Edition: Secret Rendezvous (ISBN 9780394503721)
- The parenthetical “(English and Japanese Edition)” should be removed. This is just an English edition.
- The publication date should just be 1979. It was not published on January 1, but I cannot find a specific month and date.
- The description is incorrect. It should read as follows, transcribed directly from the book jacket:
One summer morning an ambulance – no one remembers having sent for one – suddenly drives up to the salesman’s house and carries his wife away.
In this brilliant, nightmarish, savagely funny novel by one of Japan’s greatest living writers, we follow the bereft and astonished husband in his desperate search for the vanished woman, as he pursues the mysterious ambulance to a vast underground hospital, as he struggles to find his bearings in a system so complex that patients have to hire agents to help them deal with it – a maze of information-gathering technology from which no information can be extracted. Here every room and hallway is electronically bugged (tapes of patients’ “secret” trysts are collected to further the advance of science, and sold by mail order as erotic accessories). Here patients are cured only to the extent that they remain alive to be cured again. . . .
In the wake of the salesman we wander the endless corridors, encountering patients and staff – a weird, deformed, absurdly logical crew: the secretary who was a test-tube baby and, lacking human parents, also lacks a sense of human relationships . . . the truth expert who determined to perfect her marriage by subjecting every conversation to a lie detector . . . her husband, the assistant director, whose surgical solution to his problem of impotence has made him into a kind of centaur. . . . And we meet the thirteen-year-old nymphomaniac whose bones are gradually liquefying and who has become for the assistant director an obsession, an ideal – the forever incurable patient. It is she whose deadly fascination exerts itself on the salesman, eclipsing the importance of his original quest; dulling for him – though not for us – the impact of the grotesque pageant in which he at last discovers his wife. Lost with him in the labyrinth, we come to sense with him the seductiveness of the hospital and of its philosophy: that to be truly civilized is to embrace disease.
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2. Current US Paperback: Secret Rendezvous (ISBN 9780375726545)
- Juliet Winters Carpenter needs to be added with the Translator role.
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3. Perigee Paperback: Secret Rendezvous (ISBN 9780399505010)
- Juliet Winters Carpenter needs to be added with the Translator role.
- The description is incorrect. Transcribed from the back of the book:
Secret Rendezvous is a wildly comic novel by one of Japan’s greatest living writers. As we follow a man’s desperate search for his vanished wife in a vast underground hospital, we encounter a weird group of patients and staff: the emotionless secretary who was a test-tube baby, the assistant director whose surgical solution to his impotence has turned him into a sex fiend, the thirteen-year-old nymphomaniac who is suffering from an incurable disease. Kobo Abe turns the tables on the modern world of health care, with its huge bureaucracies, its frightening technological experiments, and its system that cures patients only to the extent that they remain alive to be cured again. Secret Rendezvous will stand for years to come as a classic satire.
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4. Penguin Modern Classics Paperback: Secret Rendezvous (ISBN 9780241454619)
- Juliet Winters Carpenter needs to be added with the Translator role.
- The description is incorrect. Transcribed from the back of the book:
It is 4 a.m. when the ambulance comes to take the man’s wife away – although no-one has called it, and there is nothing wrong with her. As he sets out to find her, he finds himself in the corridors of a vast underground hospital, where he encounters sinister medics, freakish sexual experiments and the unmistakable feeling of being watched. Even when he is suddenly appointed as the hospital’s chief of security, reporting to a man who thinks he is a horse, he will not give up his search. Secret Rendezvous is a nightmarish satire of bureaucracy, medicine, and modern life.
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5. Penguin Modern Classics Ebook: Secret Rendezvous (ISBN 9780141993218)
- The description is incorrect. It should be the same as Entry 4.
- The page count is missing. It should be 192.
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6. Invalid Editions
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... – Because this edition has been shelved by a few people, it needs to be merged with the US paperback (9780375726545)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1... – This edition needs to be marked invalid.