Repetition

Los Angeles Times

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

The New Yorker

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.

Publishers Weekly

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.

Library Journal

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.

Kirkus Reviews

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."