Djinn : un trou rouge entre les pavés disjoints

" Robbe-Grillet revient nous, au meilleur de sa forme, avec une manière de conte fantastique, décoré d'un titre hugolien : Djinn. That this Djinn-là is a phonetic transcription of the feminine name Jean, portrayed by one of the main characters of the film, is a first mistake. It is followed by many others. Everything is a game in this text, which does not fail to unravel, omitting what it is to give the illusion of something else. This book succeeds in being, at the same time, a marvellous story to dormir debout, as strange as a story by Hoffmann, as sweet as a novel by Lewis Carlo.une rêverie de Lewis Carroll, aussi rebondissante qu'une aventure de James Bond, et il nous apporte une excellente synthèse de l'univers romanesque de Robbe-Grillet. Everything is there. Ses décors préférés, ses objets fétiches, ses intrigues favourites d'espionnage et ses reprises maniaques des mêmes scènes sous un éclairage différent. Simon Lecoeur, on the lookout for a job, dies in the realms of a mystical American woman, Jean, who subjugates him to the point where he becomes an unlikely lover. Without explaining anything to him, she is charged with a mission that she is unable to accomplish because of an obstacle, the chute of a child on the pavement at the edge of an obscure road. This accident, perfectly programmed on the other hand, puts Simon in the hands of two children, Marie and Jean, who encourage him to play the game to find out what kind of underground organisation he belongs to: it's a society of struggle against mechanisation where, ironically, we don't use machines and where all the agents, as we discover at the end of the film, after several variations, are just robots. I think that Robbe-Grillet has never been so far from his anguish. C'est pourquoi Djinn, avec ce titre hanté et ce fil conducteur imposé, paraît me être un de ses ouvrages les plus prenants. (Jacqueline Piatier, Le Monde) Djinn est paru en 1981.