Djinn

Djinn is a novel by French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet. It was written as a French textbook with California State University, Dominguez Hills professor Yvone Lenard using a process of grammatical progression. Each chapter covers a specific element of French grammar which becomes increasingly difficult over the course of the novel. The first five chapters are written in the present tense from the first person point of view. The sixth chapter is written partially in the third person past and partially in the first person present. The eighth chapter is written in the first person point of view, but the narrator has changed from the masculine Simon Lecoeur to an unknown female narrator. The work was first released in the United States with the title Le Rendez-vous (The Meeting) with Robbe-Grillet and Lenard as co-authors. As originally planned, Le Rendez-vous (The Meeting) contained questions at the end of each chapter. The same year, Robbe-Grillet re-released the text, removing the questions and adding a prologue and an epilogue to frame the story. A year later, the novel was translated into English by Lenard and Walter Wells, also of California State University, Dominguez Hills. Plot introduction In many ways, Djinn resembles a detective fiction novel; yet at the same time, it is difficult to class as such. It tells the story of Simon Lecoeur, a thirty-year-old man, who allies himself with an American woman named Jean (Djinn) to act as a counteragent to technology. Djinn/Jean seems to lead Simon on a wild chase through Paris, but as with many of Robbe-Grillet's other works, all is not as it appears. The plot of Djinn is surrounded by a frame story, a technique that Robbe-Grillet also employed in his novel Dans le Labyrinthe (1959). The police search the home of the narrator, supposed to be Simon Lecoeur, and find the manuscript lying on the desk. The manuscript is named Le Rendez-vous (The Appointment), which differs from the name of the novel.