The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Repetition, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by Richard Howard
reviewed by Jeffrey DeShell

Untitled document

Alain Robbe-Grillet. Repetition. Trans. Richard Howard. Grove, 2003. 191 pp. $23.00.

Marking Robbe-Grillet’s return to fiction after a twenty-year absence, Repetition details the story of a secret agent, Henri Robin, as he makes his way through Europe in the late 1940s. His adventures include possibly witnessing or committing three or four murders (including a rather gruesome stabbing with a champagne flute), multiple changes of identity, apparent kidnapping and being kidnapped, encounters with Nazis and sons of Nazis, a little S&M with a woman who could be his half sister or even half daughter, a mother/sister named Joëlle Kast (Jocasta); all with accompanying druggings, dream states, vague recollections, and hallucinations. There’s more: the narrator is himself being watched and narrated by another voice, possibly his twin brother, possibly someone else. (As an interesting aside, the physical book itself has been repeated with a difference: Grove Press mistakenly placed a large part of one of the chapters—“The Third Day”—in footnote form, causing Grove to recall the flawed edition. I now hold in my hands two books: the original, flawed Repetition and the corrected, repeated Repetition.) While the plot twists, character mutations, and multiple points of view would be hopelessly confusing in the hands of a less sure hand, R-G’s crystalline and precise prose somehow manages to keep all the textual threads in place. There’s a real joy here, an exuberance and humor one does not always associate with the sometimes dour and distant (although always emotive) writing of the nouveau roman. It is this delight, combined with the adult mastery of the writing, that makes this book a welcome and important addition to R-G’s oeuvre. More than a journey through divided Europe, the protagonist’s wandering is a tour of Western literature and film, a pastiche composed of elements of de Sade, Graham Greene, Breton, Sophocles, Hitchcock, Freud, Kierkegaard, and Robbe-Grillet’s earlier novels, especially The Erasers and Jealousy. These cultural references are all remixed, as it were, and transformed into a work of remarkable complexity and, dare I say it, beauty.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Repetition, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by Richard Howard reviewed by Jeffrey DeShell Untitled document Alain Robbe-Grillet. Repetition. Trans. Richard Howard. Grove, 2003. 191 pp. $23.00. Marking Robbe-Grillet’s return to fiction after a twenty-year absence, Repetition details the story of a secret agent, Henri Robin, as he makes his way through Europe in the late 1940s. His adventures include possibly witnessing or committing three or four murders (including a rather gruesome stabbing with a champagne flute), multiple changes of identity, apparent kidnapping and being kidnapped, encounters with Nazis and sons of Nazis, a little S&M with a woman who could be his half sister or even half daughter, a mother/sister named Joëlle Kast (Jocasta); all with accompanying druggings, dream states, vague recollections, and hallucinations. There’s more: the narrator is himself being watched and narrated by another voice, possibly his twin brother, possibly someone else. (As an interesting aside, the physical book itself has been repeated with a difference: Grove Press mistakenly placed a large part of one of the chapters—“The Third Day”—in footnote form, causing Grove to recall the flawed edition. I now hold in my hands two books: the original, flawed Repetition and the corrected, repeated Repetition.) While the plot twists, character mutations, and multiple points of view would be hopelessly confusing in the hands of a less sure hand, R-G’s crystalline and precise prose somehow manages to keep all the textual threads in place. There’s a real joy here, an exuberance and humor one does not always associate with the sometimes dour and distant (although always emotive) writing of the nouveau roman. It is this delight, combined with the adult mastery of the writing, that makes this book a welcome and important addition to R-G’s oeuvre. More than a journey through divided Europe, the protagonist’s wandering is a tour of Western literature and film, a pastiche composed of elements of de Sade, Graham Greene, Breton, Sophocles, Hitchcock, Freud, Kierkegaard, and Robbe-Grillet’s earlier novels, especially The Erasers and Jealousy. These cultural references are all remixed, as it were, and transformed into a work of remarkable complexity and, dare I say it, beauty.

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