Alain Robbe-Grillet

This book is a transcript of a series of radio broadcasts, which are on the accompanying sound disc in MP3 audio format.

"It is 1949. A special agent of the French secret service, Henri Robin, is aboard a train to Berlin, on a special mission of an undisclosed nature. In what could be Graham Greene's The Third Man or a Hitchcock film, he crosses national borders and shuffles aliases with a false mustache and multiple sets of identity papers. Pulling into the station and preparing to meet his contact, Robin is alarmed by a disturbing glimpse of his own doppelganger. As Robin's time in Berlin unfolds, it becomes clear that nothing is what it seems. A shooting, a kidnapping, encounters with pimps and teenage whores, druggings, police interrogations, and torture arise in a mysterious, ever-more-dreamlike sequence, as an unnamed interlocutor points out inconsistencies in Robin's own story. As vague memories - a childhood trip to Berlin with his mother, perhaps looking for his father? - spring from ordinary images and objects, Robin's days in Berlin become a labyrinth of present and past haunted by echoes of Proust and Oedipus. But ultimately, to whom do these memories belong? And who, after all, is Robin?"--BOOK JACKET.

"A haunting, disorienting, brilliantly constructed novel, Djinn is the story of a young man who joins a clandestine organization under the command of an alluring, androgynous American girl, Djinn. Having agreed to wear dark glasses and carry a can like a blind man, he comes to realize, through bizarre encounters, recurring visual images, and fractured time sequences he experiences as part of his undisclosed mission, that he is, in a sense, helplessly blind. His search for the meaning of his mission and for possible clues to the identity of the mysterious Djinn, becomes a quest for his own identity in an ever-shifting time-space continuum. His growing obsession with solving the mystery becomes the reader's own until, through a surprising shift in narrative perspective, the reader too becomes lost in the dimension between past and future." -- Publisher's description

I've read it three times now and it is fascinating, horrifying, shocking, and will take you ultimately to a place you would rather not go - your own sick mind. If you are a man that is, and perhaps it's about time you were honest with yourself about what's in there.. For lady readers, I really don't know what you would make of this. I can't help you either, because after three readings, I'm still quite perplexed about what it is that Robbe Grillet is trying to tell me, but I do know that reading this book makes me very uneasy.

Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Belle Captive was published in 1975 and illustrated with 77 paintings by Rene Magritte. Robbe-Grillet has not chosen Magritte's paintings to mirror his text. Rather, he uses them as pretexts for the novel, letting them generate themes for an imaginary discourse that parallels their imagery, glosses them, contradicts them. Robbe-Grillet simultaneously comments on Magritte's paintings while taking advantage of them to parade his own favorite themes: play, eroticism, subversion. Magritte's rejection of illusionistic perspective and his transgressions of the normal boundaries between animal, mineral, and vegetable worlds, - rocks float like clouds, birds grow like leaves - is analogous to Robbe-Grillet's rejection of the conventions of fiction. In place of storyline, plot, and flesh-and-blood characters, Robbe-Grillet gives us a fragmented discourse, a plot that frustrates expectations, and a proliferation of characters whose identities remain problematic. The technique emphasizes the story of telling rather than the telling of a story. As readers of La Belle Captive we are invited to join in an inventive new game, unifying the separate entities, making the pictures speak and the text see. We share Robbe-Grillet's pleasure in the mysterious, poetic, and ludic in Magritte's art, and play with the cultural myths that painter and novelist both parody.

Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin. Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.