La Reprise is a French novel in the Nouveau roman style by Alain Robbe-Grillet published in France in October 2001[1] by Les Éditions de Minuit.[2] [3] It was the first novel published by Robbe-Grillet in 20 years.[1] An English version, translated by American poet and translator Richard Howard, was published as Repetition[4] (sometimes subtitled A Novel) in 2003. It was also published as an audiobook.
The plot follows a French secret service, Henri Robin, sent on a special mission to Berlin in 1949.[1] It has been compared to Graham Greene's novel The Third Man, or an Alfred Hitchcock film. He sees his own doppelganger, and the novel becomes more and more mysterious and dreamlike.[5] The story is commented on by unknown narrator, who points out inconsistencies in Robin's own story, and eventually (according to reviewer Heller McAlpin) emerges as "a Sophoclean oedipal revenge drama, complete with incest, blindness..., parricide and fratricide.[1]
It is a comic spy thriller. Robbe-Grillet once wrote: "All my novels are comic. Perhaps La Reprise more so".[6]