I labyrinten

In the Labyrinth is the story of a soldier who, after a lost battle, tramps endlessly through a strange city on a mission entrusted him by a dying comrade. Wounded, suffering from exhaustion, prey to an ever-worsening fever, and aware that the enemy is about to enter the city, the soldier must find his way among the maze-like streets to deliver a package whose contents he does not know. The growing obsession of the soldier to complete his mission becomes the reader's own through the handling of the narrative technique: the labyrinthine city is not merely described, it becomes the structure of the novel itself, with scenes intruding on each other as if on a screen where the impression can no longer be distinguished from the memory of the past and the vision of the future.

Alain Robbe-Grillet is also a filmmaker of international renown, whose screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad had a lasting effect on the art of film. Among his other books are The Erasers, The Voyeur, Topology of a Phantom City, and For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, in which he outlines his theories of fiction as art.