Djinn: a red hole between disjointed paving stones
Published 1981 by Les Editions de Minuit.
The text is from Le rendez-vous. See the Notes section below.
Published 1982 by Grove Press as Djinn. Translated by Yvone Lenard and Walter Wells.
In 1987 Grove Press packaged this with La Maison de Rendez-Vous as Djinn and La Maison de Rendez-Vous. This remains the edition available.
Unknown by me.
(Relationship with Le rendez-vous)
This novel seems a little out of place among Robbe-Grillet's work, but is still very good and even a nice introduction to him. It was originally written as a textbook with Cal State Dominguez Hills (later--or earlier--U.C. San Diego I believe) professor Yvone Lenard titled Le rendez-vous. Lenard provided a grammatical progression, and Robbe-Grillet generated his novel from that, so it becomes progressively more complicated grammatically. Unfortunately this aspect is lost in the English translation, but it's still a lot of fun to read, his lightest and most humorous book. Unfortunately Le rendez-vous is now nearly impossible to find. The text of Djinn is nearly identical to the text of Le rendez-vous, although there are minor modifications throughout, and of course Lenard's exercies as well as the preface are missing. In their place, a prologue and epilogue have been added.