When Mathias, a traveling watch salesman, returns after many years to the island of his birth, a young girl is found dead on the rocks, having been brutally raped and murdered. Slowly and inexorably the tiny details accumulate as Mathias makes an increasingly tense recapitulation of his movements on the day of the crime. Through the warped screen of his distorted mind the remembered images pile up until the reader is caught in his web of desperation. And yet in the end reality has lost all meaning. Did the crime only exist in the mind of Mathias?This brilliantly executed novel, using all the techniques that have made Robbe-Grillet's works unique, leaves behind a disturbing sense of unrest.

Author Biography

Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) was a French novelist and filmmaker, and pioneer of the literary nouveau roman movement of the 1950s and 60s. His novels are characterised by repetitive and methodical descriptions of the relations between objects, and avoid psychological and ideological commentary. In 2004 he was elected to the Academie francaise.