Author(s): Alain Robbe-Grillet ; Richard Howard (Translator)

Novel | Crime and Thriller | Translated fiction | France | Fiction Reductions

After a failed attempt on his life by an unknown terrorist cell, Professor Daniel Dupont decides to fake his own death. The government authorities, believing that the attack is part of a series of political assassinations, send Wallas, a recently promoted special investigator, to the provincial town where the crime took place. As he wanders the confusing streets of the town, he finds himself increasingly lost in a web of conspiracies, doppelgangers and memories. Cleverly deconstructing the detective genre, The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet 's first published novel, shifts between various characters and time frames, while maintaining the suspense of a conventional thriller. The result is an engrossing examination of consciousness and reality which is also one the founding texts of the Nouveau Roman school.

Review: Fascinating ... It is an intricately clever novel * The Spectator *
I doubt that fiction as art can any longer be seriously discussed without Robbe-Grillet. * The New York Times *
Uses the full apparatus of the thriller ... The conception is both inventive and subtle * The Sunday Times *

Author Biography: Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) is best known as the pioneering spokesman of the Nouveau Roman, a greatly influential movement in post-war French fiction, and as the author of Jealousy and The Voyeur.