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Alain Robbe-Grillet, C'est Gradiva qui vous appelle. Paris. Minuit. 2002. 158 pages. euro11.90. ISBN 2-7073-1793-4
LIKE THE PROTAGONIST of Robbe-Grillefs most recent novel, La Reprise, John Locke is an outsider who has stumbled upon a world of treacherous characters. Both protagonists encounter pairs of doubles, experience drug-induced confusion, and implicate themselves in murders-all in bordellos filled with Lolita-like girls and their sadomasochistic clients. And yet, the similarities somehow bear repeating.
Locke has moved to Marrakech to study the works and life of Eugene Delacroix. According to local legend, Delacroix fell in love with a harem girl whose portrait he had been commissioned to paint, inadvertently causing her execution. Recalling A. S. Byatt's Possession or Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton, of Locke's life takes on an eerie similarity to the life of...