Repetition

Alain Robbe-Grillet

"It is 1949. A special agent of the French secret service, Henri Robin, is aboard a train to Berlin, on a special mission of an undisclosed nature. In what could be Graham Greene's The Third Man or a Hitchcock film, he crosses national borders and shuffles aliases with a false mustache and multiple sets of identity papers. Pulling into the station and preparing to meet his contact, Robin is alarmed by a disturbing glimpse of his own doppelganger. As Robin's time in Berlin unfolds, it becomes clear that nothing is what it seems. A shooting, a kidnapping, encounters with pimps and teenage whores, druggings, police interrogations, and torture arise in a mysterious, ever-more-dreamlike sequence, as an unnamed interlocutor points out inconsistencies in Robin's own story. As vague memories - a childhood trip to Berlin with his mother, perhaps looking for his father? - spring from ordinary images and objects, Robin's days in Berlin become a labyrinth of present and past haunted by echoes of Proust and Oedipus. But ultimately, to whom do these memories belong? And who, after all, is Robin?"--BOOK JACKET.