Beth's review
La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The last sentence took me by surprise. If the one prepared you for the other, why do you wish you didn't now associate them?
Ultimately I think each novel's impact, but particularly Djinn's, is lessened by having been paired in a single collection. I know that volumes of authors' works are published all the time in the form of an all-in-one book, but covers are so important to my memory of a work, and this particular cover doesn't get the job done for both of these novels.
Using Djinn as an appetizer for the main course of Maison isn't actually necessary for appreciating Maison; I guess I'm just saying I can see why it was done here.
Beth's review
La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Beth's review
rating:
La Maison de Rendez-Vous is a lava lamp of a narrative, a mutating blob that repeats and repeats and repeats, the details always slightly different, with parts breaking off and then folding back in. Repetition is typical in the world of Robbe-Grillet, but it's more intense here, and the story more impossible.
A (way oversimplified) summary: A man needs to flee Hong Kong because the police are after him for the murder of a rich man, but the murdering man wants to take his favorite prostitute with him when he goes -- but she demands an incredibly high sum of money, so he visits the rich man to try to get the money, murders him when he doesn't give it to him, and comes back to the girl to find the cops waiting for him. I want to say it's a tightly constructed examination of the fallibility of memory and the process of telling stories, but part of me suspects that Robbe-Grillet was just having a blast messing with the reader.
There hasn't been much written about La Maison de Rendev...more
A (way oversimplified) summary: A man needs to flee Hong Kong because the police are after him for the murder of a rich man, but the murdering man wants to take his favorite prostitute with him when he goes -- but she demands an incredibly high sum of money, so he visits the rich man to try to get the money, murders him when he doesn't give it to him, and comes back to the girl to find the cops waiting for him. I want to say it's a tightly constructed examination of the fallibility of memory and the process of telling stories, but part of me suspects that Robbe-Grillet was just having a blast messing with the reader.
There hasn't been much written about La Maison de Rendev...more
The last sentence took me by surprise. If the one prepared you for the other, why do you wish you didn't now associate them?
Ultimately I think each novel's impact, but particularly Djinn's, is lessened by having been paired in a single collection. I know that volumes of authors' works are published all the time in the form of an all-in-one book, but covers are so important to my memory of a work, and this particular cover doesn't get the job done for both of these novels. Using Djinn as an appetizer for the main course of Maison isn't actually necessary for appreciating Maison; I guess I'm just saying I can see why it was done here.