Customer Reviews

Repetition: A Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 paperback one they gave the "notes" the same font size as the actual text, calling to much attention to them, and weakening the effect - for, you have to know, at some point the "notes" start contradicting and incriminating the narrator, and claiming more and more space...)

If you want to read excellent books that contain mysteries but aren't police procedurals, this is a great author. I gave it four rather than five stars because I don't think this is his finest book, but it was excellent. There is a fine, subtle, mind at work and this is "literature", not just a razzle-dazzle mystery.

This is a superb novel but one that is not for everyone with its hallucinatory prose, uncertain and shifting identities and themes of incest, forbidden love, s&m, Lolita... all taking places in the ruins of Germany in 1949

Everyone encountered is not quite what he or she seems but the main characters - our "hero" HR aka Henri Robin aka many other names - his seeming double (identity and role to be revealed later), his "handler", the older German officer that is a target of assassination and the mysterious mother and daughter of the American zone in Berlin whose past and relationships with the main characters above is also slowly revealed give this novel its power in addition to the superb prose.

Highly, highly recommended and another novel that needs to be read at least twice since early happenings change or deepen their sense after later revelations so the second reading will be quite different than the first

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 the musing of an old master.

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 in post-World War II Berlin, a spy--the protagonist Henri Robin--is sent on a secret mission of which he knows nothing. He witnesses a murder, but the body subsequently disappears. Robin's peregrinations throughout Berlin remind him of events in his youth. Apparently drugged, he (and we) loses track of where and who he is. What is his real name? Is he a murderer? Who is the double who looks exactly like him?

The narrative is written in the form of a report by Robin submitted to his superior. Someone annotates the narrative with various footnotes of his own, often calling into question the accuracy and truthfulness of Robin's words. Doppelgangers and doublings add to the confusion, as Robbe-Grillet successfully imposes a sense of plot incomprehensibility on his reader, who is challenged to discover what is really going on behind all the deceptions.

Characterization, as usual, is problematic for Robbe-Grillet, as his intentions here are never the same as, say, Dickens. He wrote half a century ago that he doesn't believe in "the novel of characters" and Repetition is proof he hasn't suffered a conversion. The reader turns the final page and closes the book with no lasting image of Robin, the main character. Gigi, the child who figures prominently in the story, is completely unbelievable in the role Robbe-Grillet has imposed on her, either as a "real" person or as a "non-real" person, and none of the other characters are developed in any significant way, because Robbe-Grillet is not interested in character, and never was.

Having said that, the characters are fleshed out in somewhat more depth than we've come to expect, which isn't saying much. He allows more dialog between the characters than one would have expected as well. Another bonus for the casual reader is that the narrative moves faster than in his early novels, as if Robbe-Grillet has deliberately decided to employ the standard novelistic devices he previously scorned. But his strength here is obfuscation, prodding the reader to wonder who Henri Robin really is, did he commit a murder, who was murdered, was anyone really murdered, who did it, how much of the plot really happened, what do we really know, how much can we ever know about anything including ourselves, what is the truth, and so on. The conclusion of the mystery is something of a disappointment, and rather far-fetched.

Unfortunately, Repetition includes gratuitous scenes of sadomasochism involving a little girl, Gigi, who is 14 years old. Robbe-Grillet has often defended his personal interest in girls in interviews over the years. The violation of Gigi isn't sensual or thrilling or even "literary." The reaction of the reader is one of puzzlement, prompting the question: Why? Merely to illustrate and satisfy the author's longstanding obsession at the expense of the narrative? Hallucinatory surrealism? Hardly.

Repetition hearkens back to "The Erasers," Robbe-Grillet's early, highly-praised novel, which also incorporated elements of Sophocles' Oedipus myth. Robbe-Grillet has had his admirers and detractors over the years, and he has richly deserved both. He brought to life a new way of writing and proved its artistic worth in his best novel--Jealousy. Repetition is a summation of all his previous books: many similarities, a few differences, and despite the 20-year hiatus since his last novel, nothing new or forward-looking to announce to the world. Repetition is Robbe-Grillet's attempt to "put his affairs in order" with a recapping of his contribution.

This novel reportedly sold well in France, but Robbe-Grillet long ago committed the cardinal sin with American readers: he bored them, and his appeal on this side of the Atlantic is limited almost entirely to academic scholars--certainly not to the general book-buying public. For someone just wanting to know what Robbe-Grillet is all about, Repetition is probably the best introduction.