We are in the bombed-out Berlin of 1949, after the Second World
War, rendered with an atmosphere reminiscent of Orson Welles' The
Third Man. Henri Robin, a special agent of the French secret
service, arrives in the ruined former capital to which he feels
linked by a vague but recurrent childhood memory. But the real
purpose of his mission has not been revealed to him, for his
superiors have decided to afford him only as much information as is
indispensable for the action expected of his blind loyalty. But
nothing is what it seems, and matters do not turn out as
anticipated. Indeed, the events that punctuate the secret agent's
stay in Berlin are liable to abrupt transitions, thrilling and
questionable in equal measure: a shooting, a kidnapping, druggings,
encounters with pimps and teenage whores, police interrogations,
even some elegantly staged torture. These bloody events take place
amid thick fog along the city's canals, and even more mysterious
narrative tricks. Robin--or is the narrator actually twin
brothers?--falls in love with a mysterious woman named Jo Kast (a
reference to Oedipus's mother Jocasta). Her teenaged daughter
Gegenecke (the German translation of Antigone), a provocative
blonde, will form a strange partnership reminiscent of the blind
Oedipus led into exile by Antigone. Dupont, the hero of The
Erasers, returns here as van Brucke (both names mean "Of the
Bridge," one in French, the other in German). In this astonishing
fictional cat-and-mouse game, reminiscent of Daedalus's labyrinth,
nothing that is remembered can be altogether true, but only what is
remembered can be real. Readers of Robbe-Grillet's novel Erasers
will recognize, as the secret agent of Repetition slowly becomes
aware that he was in Berlin before--as a child, with his mother,
perhaps looking for his father--the same allusions to bits and
pieces of the Oedipus story built into the hero's own. Indeed
"erasing" a story by retelling it is the central motif of all
Robbe-Grillet's fiction and films, of which this latest and
probably last novel is in many ways the most revealing and
triumphant version.
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