About The Book

La Maison de Rendez-vous

With Hong Kong as the setting, the master of the “new novel” creates a world of crime, intrigue, and passion dominated by Lady Ava’s mysterious Blue Villa. The novella unfolds over the course of only one evening, but the events of that night recur repeatedly, and the same moments are described from the perspectives of different characters. Robbe-Grillet creates an unsettling work that challenges his readers’ ideas about subjectivity and objectivity, fiction and fact, and the entire process of story-telling.

Djinn

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 cane 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.

Praise

“Alain Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution in the novel.” –Claude Mauriac

“[La Maison de Rendez-vous is] a new literary entertainment, and a poetic, amusing, captivating book.” –The New York Times Book Review

“[La Maison de Rendez-vous] is a funny book, a provocation, a do-it-yourself mystery or a fairy tale.” –Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times

“Djinn may win a whole generation over to the noveau roman.” –International Herald Tribune

“Robbe-Grillet is at the top of his form with this fantastic tale.” –Le Monde