Repetition

November 1949: a minor French intelligence agent travels by train into a Berlin divided among the four Allied powers, on an assignment nobody has explained to him and in a city he half remembers. Stepping out of his compartment, he returns to find his own double in his seat, identical except that he wears no fake moustache. The agent goes by several names, Henri Robin, HR, Ascher. Guided by a contact, Pierre Garin, he crosses the bombed-out city to the empty home of a beautiful woman, Jo Kast, whose world of young women and secrets soon draws him in. Drugged or hallucinating, he loses his way among doubles, tunnels and corpses that get up again, while footnotes from a second narrator increasingly contradict his account. Spy story, erotic fantasy and the myth of Oedipus are mixed together.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

252 pages in the original

Genres

Crime (assigned by AI)

Set in

Germany, 1949

First published

2001 by Éditions de Minuit

Author's age

79 when first published

ISBN

9782707317568 (original)

9780802117366 (Grove Press, United States)

9780802140579 (Grove Press, United States)

More

Wikidata