Dans le labyrinthe Reading Order

Dans le labyrinthe (In the Labyrinth, 1959) by Alain Robbe-Grillet is the most enigmatic of his major novels and the one that most openly incorporates elements of the fantastic. A soldier wanders through the streets of a labyrinthine city in winter, carrying a box he was asked to deliver to someone. He may be sick — there are passages in which he seems to be hallucinating, or to be narrating from a sick-bed — and the city he is lost in may be partly the product of a picture on the wall of the room where the sick narrator lies. The city is also, evidently, a city in the aftermath of a military defeat (a parallel to the French defeats of 1940 or 1870 or any other national disaster), and the box the soldier is carrying may contain something valuable from that defeat, a connection to a lost unit, a message to someone's family. Dans le labyrinthe refuses to resolve any of these uncertainties: the novel's subject is the labyrinth itself — the city as the experience of being lost, the narrative as the impossibility of finding a thread that leads out. Robbe-Grillet's prose here is at its most spare and hypnotic, and the novel's structure — in which interior and exterior, sick-room and city street, past defeat and present wandering, continuously dissolve into one another — represents the Nouveau Roman method at its most philosophically ambitious.