French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Robbe-Grillet, Djinn. A Red Hole Between the Disjointed Paving Stones
Novel and Narrative Prose

Djinn - A Red Hole Between the Disjointed Paving Stones
Alain Robbe-Grillet

PUBLICATION DATE: 04/04/13 PUBLISHER: Minuit (Les Editions de) SERIES: double ISBN: 978-2-7073-2289-0 EAN: 9782707322890 FORMAT: Pocket PRESENTATION: Paperback NO. OF PAGES: 138 p.

Robbe-Grillet returns to us, at the top of his game, with a sort of fantastical tale adorned with a Hugoesque title: Djinn. That this particular djinn is a phonetic transcription of the American female name Jean, borne by one of the story's major characters, is his first bit of mischief. Many others will follow. Everything is a game in this text, which constantly doubles, making us forget what it is to create the perfect illusion of something else.

This book succeeds in being, at once, a wonderful "wildly far-fetched tale," as strange as a story by Hoffmann, as whimsical as a Lewis Carroll daydream, and as full of twists and turns as a James Bond adventure, while offering an excellent synthesis of Robbe-Grillet's novelistic universe. Everything is there: his favorite settings, his fetish objects, his preferred espionage plots, and his obsessive repetitions of the same scenes under different lighting.

Simon Lecoeur, looking for a job, falls into the snare of a mysterious American woman, Jean, who so captivates him that he instantly falls in love with her. Without explaining anything, she entrusts him with a mission that an apparently unforeseen obstacle—a child falling onto the disjointed paving stones of a dark alley—prevents him from completing. This accident, which was actually perfectly planned, places Simon back in the hands of two children, Marie and Jean, who force him to play blind to discover which underground organization he is serving: it is a society fighting against mechanization where, ironically, only machines are used, and whose agents, as we discover at the end of the story after several variations, are nothing but robots.

Alain Robbe-Grillet is widely recognized as a leading figure of the French *nouveau roman* movement, which emerged in the mid-twentieth century and challenged traditional novelistic conventions regarding plot, character development and realism. Within his oeuvre, works frequently engage with self-referential playful structures, cinematic techniques and recurring thematic obsessions such as espionage, mystery and artificiality. Readers familiar with twentieth-century experimental narrative traditions often encounter in these texts a deliberate subversion of conventional storytelling expectations, where illusion and repetition play central roles in shaping the reading experience.

The text presents a fantastical tale that incorporates elements reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, E.T.A. Hoffmann and adventure fiction, while acting as a synthesis of the author's novelistic universe. The narrative follows Simon Lecoeur as he becomes entangled with a mysterious American woman named Jean, leading to an aborted mission and an encounter with an underground society. Readers interested in contemporary French narrative experiments and twentieth-century avant-garde literature may find this work relevant to their literary pursuits.