Djinn

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

"A haunting, disorienting, brilliantly constructed novel, Djinn is the story of a young man who joins a clandestine organization under the command of an alluring, androgynous American girl, Djinn. Having agreed to wear dark glasses and carry a can like a blind man, he comes to realize, through bizarre encounters, recurring visual images, and fractured time sequences he experiences as part of his undisclosed mission, that he is, in a sense, helplessly blind. His search for the meaning of his mission and for possible clues to the identity of the mysterious Djinn, becomes a quest for his own identity in an ever-shifting time-space continuum. His growing obsession with solving the mystery becomes the reader's own until, through a surprising shift in narrative perspective, the reader too becomes lost in the dimension between past and future." -- Publisher's description