Recollections of the Golden Triangle


Book Description

“Could be read as the French New Novelist’s tribute to the vibrant Latin American fiction that his own early works helped to inspire” (The New York Times Book Review). A provocative novel by one of the most influential French writers, Recollections of the Golden Triangle is a tour de force: a literary thriller constructed of wildly diverse elements—fantasy and dream, erotic invention, and the stuff of popular fiction and movies taken to its farthest limits. A secret door that is opened slightly by an electronic device, a beautiful hanged factory girl, a pale young aristocrat whose blood apparently nourishes his vampiric lover, the evil Dr. Morgan who conducts his experiments in “tertiary dream behavior,” the beautiful and sinister women from the world of horror films, and the investigating police, who are not all what they seem to be, are just some of the ingredients of this intriguing new novel by the French master of the intellectual thriller, whose novels and films have effectively changed the way we can look at the “real” world today. Recollections of the Golden Triangle challenges the reader to find his own meaning in its descriptions, clues, and contradictions, and to play detective by assembling the pieces of the fictional puzzle. “If you make the effort [to read Recollections of a Golden Triangle], you will have a richer and more rewarding experience than you would reading a conventional mystery story.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch “A sense of atmosphere and a power of representation that at best make one feel that one is looking over an artist’s shoulder with one eye on the canvas and the other on the reality that he is sketching.” ―The Times




Recollections of the Golden Triangle


Book Description

“Could be read as the French New Novelist’s tribute to the vibrant Latin American fiction that his own early works helped to inspire” (The New York Times Book Review). A provocative novel by one of the most influential French writers, Recollections of the Golden Triangle is a tour de force: a literary thriller constructed of wildly diverse elements—fantasy and dream, erotic invention, and the stuff of popular fiction and movies taken to its farthest limits. A secret door that is opened slightly by an electronic device, a beautiful hanged factory girl, a pale young aristocrat whose blood apparently nourishes his vampiric lover, the evil Dr. Morgan who conducts his experiments in “tertiary dream behavior,” the beautiful and sinister women from the world of horror films, and the investigating police, who are not all what they seem to be, are just some of the ingredients of this intriguing new novel by the French master of the intellectual thriller, whose novels and films have effectively changed the way we can look at the “real” world today. Recollections of the Golden Triangle challenges the reader to find his own meaning in its descriptions, clues, and contradictions, and to play detective by assembling the pieces of the fictional puzzle. “If you make the effort [to read Recollections of a Golden Triangle], you will have a richer and more rewarding experience than you would reading a conventional mystery story.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch “A sense of atmosphere and a power of representation that at best make one feel that one is looking over an artist’s shoulder with one eye on the canvas and the other on the reality that he is sketching.” ―The Times




Understanding Alain Robbe-Grillet


Book Description

"Transforming bewilderment into understanding and pleasure while preserving a sense of Robbe-Grillet's considerable richness and complexity, Smith elucidates the defining elements of the writer's fictional world - characters that barely exist, changeable narrators, plots that defy logic, notoriously meticulous descriptions that never quite form a complete story. Smith examines Robbe-Grillet's embrace of discontinuity, circularity, indeterminacy, and linguistic play. Smith also poses questions about how we should view this perplexing writer: as an author of hyperobjective novels and short stories, a subjective novelist, a realist, or a writer who undermines the narrative's claim to represent reality. In addition Smith evaluates the sado-erotic imagery of Robbe-Grillet's middle and late novels as a metaphorical play with textual and social conventions."--BOOK JACKET.




The Erasers


Book Description

The first book from the French avant-gardist and author of Jealousy. “Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution in the novel” (Claude Mauriac, cultural critic for Le Figaro). Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the nouveau roman and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is turned over to a police agent—who may in fact be the assassin. Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pulls us along to its ominous conclusion. “On the surface, and surface is the key word with this author, The Erasers is a mystery story, where a police agent named Wallas stalks an unknown assassin through a nameless puzzleboard Flemish town . . . Nothing is certain. The only thing the reader can be sure of is the laser precise detail in which all that isn’t clear is described, catalogued and analyzed.” —The Millions “A haunting, mystifying evocation of a murder that will keep your attention riveted.” —The Dallas Morning News Praise for Alain Robbe-Grillet “I can think of no other writer who can render the banal so fearfully fantastic.” —Books and Bookmen “I doubt that fiction as art can any longer be seriously discussed without Robbe-Grillet.” —The New York Times




Repetition


Book Description

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.




Two Novels


Book Description

Jealousy: "In a tropical jungle overlooking a banana plantation, a jealous husband is obsessed by his suspicion of adultery between his wife and his neighbor. Robbe-Grillet's handling of the devastating effect on the tormented husband and his subsequent violence gives us one of the most disturbing treatment of jealousy in contemporary fiction."--Publisher description




Zodiac


Book Description

The second novel from the “hottest science fiction writer in America” and New York Times–bestselling author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon (Details). Meet Sangamon Taylor, a New Age Sam Spade who sports a wet suit instead of a trench coat and prefers Jolt from the can to Scotch on the rocks. He knows about chemical sludge the way he knows about evil—all too intimately. And the toxic trail he follows leads to some high and foul places. Before long Taylor’s house is bombed, his every move followed, he’s adopted by reservation Indians, moves onto the FBI’s most wanted list, makes up with his girlfriend, and plays a starring role in the near-assassination of a presidential candidate. Closing the case with the aid of his burnout roommate, his tofu-eating comrades, three major networks, and a range of unconventional weaponry, Sangamon Taylor pulls off the most startling caper in Boston Harbor since the Tea Party. “[Stephenson] captures the nuance and the rhythm of the new world so perfectly that one almost thinks that it is already here.” —The Washington Post




Small Memories


Book Description

The Nobel Prize–winning author of Blindness recalls the days of his youth in Lisbon and the Portuguese countryside in this charming memoir. José Saramago was eighteen months old when he moved from the village of Azinhaga with his father and mother to live in Lisbon. But he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence to stay with his maternal grandparents, illiterate peasants in the eyes of the outside world, but a fount of knowledge, affection, and authority to young José. Small Memories traces the formation of a man who emerged, against all odds, as one of the world’s most respected writers. Shifting between childhood and his teenage years, between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this mosaic of memories looks back into the author’s boyhood: the tragic death of his older brother at the age of four; his mother pawning the family’s blankets every spring and buying them back in time for winter; his grandparents bringing the weaker piglets into their bed on cold nights; and Saramago’s early encounters with literature, from teaching himself to read to poring over a Portuguese-French conversation guide, not realizing that he was in fact reading a play by Molière.




Dog Soldiers


Book Description

Small-time journalist John Converse thinks to cash in on the last days of the Vietnam War by becoming involved in a major drug deal, but things go very wrong when he gets back to the U.S. and finds himself hunted by a corrupt government agent.




Somersault


Book Description

The first new novel Oe has published since winning the Nobel Prize, Somersault is a magnificent story of the charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith. A decade before the story opens, two men referred to as the Patron and Guide of mankind were leaders of an influential religious movement. When a radical faction of their followers threatened to unleash an apocalypse, they recanted all of their teachings and abandoned their followers. Now, after ten years of silence, Patron and Guide begin contacting their old followers and reaching out to the public, assisted by a small group of young people who have come to them in recent months. Just as they are beginning this renewed push, the radical faction kidnaps Guide, holding him captive until his health gives out. Patron and a small core of the faithful, including a painter named Kizu who may become the new Guide, move to the mountains to establish the church’s new base, followed by two groups from Patron’s old church: the devout Quiet Women, and the Technicians, who have ties to the old radical faction. The Baby Fireflies, young men from a nearby village, attempt to influence the church with local traditions and military discipline. As planning proceeds for the summer conference that will bring together the faithful and launch the new church in the eyes of the world, the conflicting agendas of these factions threaten to make a mockery of the church’s unity—or something far more dangerous.