Recommendations
Books Like La Maison de rendez-vous by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Books for readers who loved the Hong Kong fantasy and Robbe-Grillet's postmodern satire of colonial adventure fiction
La Maison de rendez-vous (1965) is Robbe-Grillet's playful later novel — set in a fictional colonial-fantasy Hong Kong, freely mixing narrative strands and repeating scenes with variations; a satire of the exotic adventure novel genre. These 8 books share its self-conscious genre play, its exotic setting as cultural projection, and its postmodern mixing of narrative conventions.
- 1
Buy on AmazonLa Jalousie
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The masterpiece — read before La Maison de rendez-vous to understand the formal method that the later novel loosens into genre play.
- 2
Buy on AmazonLes Gommes
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The debut — the plot-driven Robbe-Grillet that is the best introduction before the more playful La Maison de rendez-vous.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Orientalist
by Tom Reiss
The Western fantasy of the Orient in biographical form — the historical companion to Robbe-Grillet's fictional exploration of how the West imagines Asia.
- 4
Buy on AmazonTyphoon
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad in the China Sea — the serious version of the colonial adventure fiction that La Maison de rendez-vous is satirising; reading both shows the gap between the genre's self-image and Robbe-Grillet's exposure of its conventions.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe World of Yesterday
by Stefan Zweig
The memoir of a Europe before the catastrophes — the biographical companion to Robbe-Grillet's fictional treatment of a colonial world that is also a world of yesterday.
- 6
Buy on AmazonNaked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
The American experimental novel that uses the cut-up method to mix scenes and narratives without coherent sequence — the most direct parallel to La Maison de rendez-vous's non-linear scene repetition.
- 7
Buy on AmazonIf on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by Italo Calvino
A novel that explicitly uses genre conventions while examining them — Calvino's postmodern self-consciousness shares La Maison de rendez-vous's playful relationship to the thriller genre.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A European city that behaves according to the logic of a dream rather than the logic of realist fiction — shares La Maison de rendez-vous's refusal of narrative coherence and its use of repeated scenes with variations.
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