Repetition: A Novel

by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Howard (Translator)

Overview

From the French master of the avant-garde: “A spy tale whose prime puzzle lies in the philosophical intricacies of its own construction” (Entertainment Weekly).
 
We are in the bombed-out Berlin of 1949, after the Second World War, rendered with an atmosphere reminiscent of Orson Welles’ The Third Man. Henri Robin, a special agent of the French secret service, arrives in the ruined former capital to which he feels linked by a vague but recurrent childhood memory. But the real purpose of his mission has not been revealed to him, for his superiors have decided to afford him only as much information as is indispensable for the action expected of his blind loyalty. But nothing is what it seems, and matters do not turn out as anticipated . . .
 
“Exhibits a sensibility as nervous and contemporary—not to mention witty—as that of any novelist working today.” —The Los Angeles Times
 
“Mirrors, doubles, double agents, repetitions, trompe l’oeil war paintings, dream sequences, sexual torture, a criminal mafia of postwar Nazis and murky memories add to the disquieting, disorienting literary puzzle.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A Gothic masterpiece . . . Repetition is fearfest like no other, and a rewarding text that demands to be reread again and again. The master hasn’t lost his touch.” —The Avon Grove Sun

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802199355
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/26/2020
Series:	Books That Changed the World
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	209
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Homme de lettres, membre de l Academie francaise, auteur et realisateur de films, Alain Robbe-Grillet est ne en 1922 (Brest) et decede en 2008. Avant de se consacrer aux lettres et a la realisation de films, Alain Robbe-Grillet, diplome de l Institut national agronomique, est charge de mission a l Institut national de la statistique a Paris (1945-1948), et ingenieur a l Institut de fruits et agrumes coloniaux (au Maroc, en Guinee francaise, a la Martinique et a la Guadeloupe). Par ailleurs, en parallele a son activite d auteur et de realisateur, il est conseiller litteraire des editions de Minuit (1955-1985); membre du Haut Comite pour la defense et l expansion de la langue francaise (1966-1968); professeur a New York University, a Washington University, et directeur du Centre de sociologie de la litterature a l universite de Bruxelles (1980-1988). Grand nom de la litterature francaise du XXe siecle, Alain Robbe-Grillet fut le chantre et le pape du Nouveau Roman, courant litteraire des annees 1950-1970. Officier de la Legion d honneur, de l ordre national du Merite et des Arts et des Lettres, l Academie francaise lui ouvre ses portes en 2004. Alain Robbe-Grillet est l auteur de nombreux romans, dont, notamment: "Les Gommes" (Minuit, 1953), "Le Voyeur" (1955), "Jalousie" (Minuit, 1957), "Dans le labyrinthe" (Minuit, 1959), "La Maison de rendez-vous" (Minuit, 1965), "Projet pour une revolution a New York" (Minuit, 1970), "Topologie d une cite fantome" (Minuit, 1976), "Djinn" (Minuit, 1981), "Le Miroir qui revient" (Minuit, 1985), "Les Derniers jours" "de Corinthe" (Minuit, 1994), "La Reprise" (Minuit, 2001), "Un roman sentimental" (Fayard, 2007). On lui doit aussiplusieurs essais: "Pour un nouveau roman" (Minuit, 1963), "Le Voyageur" (Bourgois, 2001), "Scenarios en rose et noir" (Fayard, 2005). Par ailleurs, Alain Robbe-Grillet a ecrit et realise "L immortelle" (1963), "Trans-Europ-Express" (1967), "L Homme qui ment" (1968), "L Eden et apres" (1970), "Glissements progressifs du plaisir" (1974), "Le Jeu avec le feu" (1975), "La Belle captive" (1983), "Un bruit qui rend fou" (1995), "C est Gradiva qui vous appelle" (2007).Brassai (born Gyula Halasz, 1899-1984) was a photographer, journalist, and author of photographic monographs and literary works, including "Letters to My Parents" and "Conversations with Picasso," both published by the University of Chicago Press. Richard Howard, a professor at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, is an award-winning poet and translator. His translations include books by Gide, Cocteau, Giraudoux, De Beauvoir, Barthes, Cioran, and Proust, and Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal," for which he received the American Book Award.

Editorial Reviews

Of course, not everything can be made new all the time -- how exhausting that would be. As the preoccupation with objects and with narrative device attest, this novel packs in plenty of the old Robbe-Grillet, including erotic-sadistic passages decidedly not for the faint of heart. Although Franz Kafka is his repeatedly cited artistic mentor (The Castle meets The Trial), other modern writers also come to mind: the Vladimir Nabokov of Pale Fire and Lolita and the current medal-holder of unreliable narration, Kazuo Ishiguro. Not bad company to be in. — Kai Maristed

Los Angeles Times

The grand old man of the nouveau roman has published his first novel in two decades, and, faithful to its title, it is not at all new but, rather, a variation on old themes and obsessions. In fact, "Repetition" is a sort of deliberate distortion -- or alteration, or rewriting, or retelling -- of Robbe-Grillet's earlier books, in particular the first, "The Erasers" (1953). The plot, such as it is, concerns a French secret agent who, in 1949, is sent to Berlin, where he witnesses a murder. This leads him to search out his own past. The reader, meanwhile, is led to distrust every narrator who pops up. Robbe-Grillet's conviction that the true writer has nothing to say, only the way he says it, remains undimmed, but seldom has the nouveau roman seemed so ancien.

The New Yorker

A spy novel about a French agent in 1949 Berlin becomes an oedipal journey into the agent's past and an adventure in unreliable narration in this work by nouveau roman pioneer Robbe-Grillet, his first in 20 years. Henri Robin (or so his passport identifies him) is a spy crossing Europe on a train, pondering a mission that has yet to be revealed to him. As he enters the ravaged city, Robin is haunted by flashbacks, even though, ostensibly, he has never been to Berlin before. His assignment, he learns, is to watch a murder that's supposed to take place in an outdoor plaza. Robin observes closely, but when he goes to recount the details, his story is confused and contradictory, and Robin finds himself in the heart of the murder investigation. As the nebulous case plays out, Robin comes to live with the murder victim's wife and adolescent daughter, Gigi, the latter representing a pivotal link to Robin's family history as well as the espionage machinations. Robbe-Grillet shifts back and forth between the criminal investigation, the espionage plot and the playful Freudian analysis of Robin's childhood and subconscious. Extensive footnotes introduce the possibility that Robin may in fact be a lunatic. Newcomers braced for surreal narrative lurches will find this an entertaining introduction to Robbe-Grillet's work. As the title coyly suggests, his admirers will find much of this territory familiar, but that only adds another layer of irony to Robbe-Grillet's witty allusions. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In Fifties France, Robbe-Grillet helped originate the nouveau roman, or "new novel," which challenged traditional concepts of narration. He returns after a 20-year silence with a sort of literary thriller, set in 1949 Berlin. Henri Robin doesn't know why the French Secret Service has sent him to the devastated city, but he has the uneasy feeling that he has been here before. Immediately, odd things begin to happen; on the train, he had spotted a doppelg nger, something that used to happen in childhood; upon arriving, he witnesses a shooting, finds that the body has disappeared, and senses that he is being framed for murder. Layers of his past are slowly peeled away to a core that is not all that surprising; what is thrilling here is Robbe-Grillet's extraordinary command of language and his skill at creating atmosphere. Experimental fiction can seem to meander, and many nouveaux romans can seem claustrophobic. But without benefit of heavy plot, the author still gives this work plenty of propulsion; reading the copious footnotes slows one just a bit. For all academic and large public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/02.]-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Though it’s been 20 years since his last novel, the clock has stopped in more ways than one on Robbe-Grillet’s latest and (as its title aptly suggests) least novel nouveau roman. The sometime narrator’s troubles begin even before his train pulls into Berlin in 1949. The untried secret agent wearing a false mustache and traveling on a passport identifying him as engineer Henri Robin returns to his compartment to find that his place has been taken by a man who looks just like him—even more like him than he does, since the double lacks the mustache. Is he a natural twin, a tormentor, or perhaps (here comes the Robbe-Grillet twist) the real narrator? Leaving him behind, maybe, Robin enters the divided city, where he’s to provide an objective observer’s account of a murder scheduled to be committed in the square outside his lodgings. The murder goes off on cue, but Robin’s hopelessly muddled account of it—who’s shot Colonel Dany von Brücke? what’s become of his body? is he actually dead?—portends a more generalized breakdown of the narrative contract. As a carping annotator begins to find more misleading factual inaccuracies, grammatical inconsistencies, and deceptions in his tale of moving in with von Brücke’s widow Joëlle Kast and his nubile schoolgirl daughter Gigi, Robbe-Grillet figures the unreliability of the narrator, now calling himself Boris Wallon and Franck Matthieu, by obsessively referring to the story of Oedipus, recalling not only Sophocles and Kierkegaard but Robbe-Grillet’s celebrated first novel The Erasers (1955), and by returning to the strain of sadistic pedophilia that’s run through his work from The Voyeur (1957) to La Belle Captive (1995). The self-seriousness ofRobbe-Grillet’s early experimental fiction has devolved into a grave playfulness. Mostly, though, the narrator is right on the money from the opening line: "Here, then, I repeat, and I sum up."

Kirkus Reviews