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Repetition: A Novel
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780802140579
ISBN: 0802140572
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 208
Publication Date: February 17, 2004
Publisher: Grove Press
Studio: Grove Press
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Editorial Review:
Reminiscent of Orson Welles's The Third Man, Repetition is an atmospheric spy novel of violence, mystery, and tricks of the eye, set in a bombed-out 1949 Berlin. Henri Robin, a special agent of the French secret service, arrives in the ruined city and feels linked to it by a vague and recurrent memory. There is a shooting, a kidnapping, druggings, encounters with pimps and teenage whores, police interrogations, even torture. Bits and pieces of the Oedipus story resonate through the book's elegant labyrinth as Robin slowly senses that he was in Berlin before — as a child, with his mother, perhaps looking for his father. A brilliantly executed novel in prose of an almost hallucinatory richness, Repetition is proof that Robbe-Grillet's vision is, in a time of identity theft and porous nationhood, more relevant than ever.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Familiar Unusual Territory
Alain Robbe-Grillet abandoned the novel format 20 years ago. Why, now in his early 80s, does he return? Will he unveil to the world something completely original? Will he pen something starkly at odds with his oeuvre? Will he breathe new life into the moribund "New Novel" and point the way into the 21st century? Well no, nothing like that. Repetition, you might say, is Robbe-Grillet's "Greatest Hits" novel, with one or two "bonus tracks" thrown in to entice the book-consuming public.
Set ... Read More
Rating: - Is This Book As Good As It Seems
Very different in style from almost anything you have read before. At times it's difficult to determine who the book is about and who the "narrator", who keeps putting in long notes, actually is (or R-G wants you to think he is). The great thing about the story is that it keeps repeating but always changing. It like an illusion, viewed through a dirty window. Each layer of dirt you remove gives you a new perspective.
Read it and decide for yourself whether it is a great belle-lettre or just ... Read More
Rating:  - One of Robbe-Grillet's best
This is the kind of book that, after a writer's death, turns out to be a masterpiece which just happened to go unnoticed, and "How is it possible?", Sunday literay supplements will ask, and blah, blah, blah...
It's one of Robbe-Grillet's best three books (the others being "Jelousy" and "The Voyeur").
I'll make it short: just read the excerpts available here at Amazon.com. If you like it, there you go. If you don't: read it again.
(Oh, if you find it, buy the hardcover edition. In the ... Read More
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