Topology of a Phantom City

This is Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first novel in seven years. The book was hailed as ’a masterful creation’ by French reviewers who see it as marking an important new stage in the development of the famous founder of the ’new novel.’ Here the reader is cast in the role of archeologist digging through the various strata of a city in rubble, each level yielding clues to a mysterious bloody death, but recounted and remembered in many different ways. The murder is that of a lovely young girl, her naked body stained with a viscous red liquid. Was she murdered upon a stone altar in a ritual sacrifice? Or perhaps gang-raped by plundering soldiers?