Djinn

Blurb

Djinn is a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. It was written as a French textbook with California State University, Dominguez Hills professor Yvone Lenard using a process of grammatical progression. Each chapter covers a specific element of French grammar which becomes increasingly difficult over the course of the novel. The first five chapters are written in the present tense from the first person point of view. The sixth chapter is written partially in the third person past and partially in the first person present. The eighth chapter is written in the first person point of view, but the narrator has changed from the masculine Simon Lecoeur to an unknown female narrator.
The work was first released in the United States with the title Le Rendez-vous and contained questions at the end of each chapter. The same year, Robbe-Grillet re-released the text, removing the questions and adding a prologue and an epilogue to frame the story. A year later, the novel was translated into English by Lenard and Walter Wells, also of California State University, Dominguez Hills.