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....

Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself-or a foreigner's nightmare of New York-as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art-and back again. Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed...

X attempts to convince A that they met last year in this same hotel (or maybe it was in a different one). They loved each other, emotionally and physically. She agrees to elope with him and get away from M, her husband (or lover). At the last moment, she refuses (for whatever reason) and asked for a one year postponement. Now, the year has passed and X has come to their agreed rendezvous to take her away. A claims she does not recognize X and does...