La Maison de Rendez-vous and Djinn

Two stunning works from the French avant-garde writer and filmmaker, the master of the "new novel" literary movement.   La Maison de Rendez-vous   With Hong Kong as the setting, Alain Robbe-Grillet 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. In La Maison de Rendez-vous, Robbe-Grillet creates "a new literary entertainment, and a poetic, amusing, captivating book" ( The New York Times Book Review).   Djinn   A haunting, disorienting, brilliantly constructed novel, Djinn "may win a whole generation over to the nouveau roman" ( International Herald Tribune). It 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.   "Alain Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution in the novel." —Claude Mauriac, cultural critic for Le Figaro   "[ La Maison de Rendez-vous] is a funny book, a provocation, a do-it-yourself mystery or a fairy tale." — The New York Times   "Robbe-Grillet is at the top of his form with this fantastic tale." — Le Monde