Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself—or a foreigner's nightmare of New York—as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art—and back again. Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed through a haze of drugs and alcohol, Project for a Revolution in New York is a Sadean reverie that bears an alarming resemblance to the New York, and the United States, that have actually come into being.
Roger Shattuck - New York Times Book Review
“There is a universal principle at work [in Project] . . . I can describe it best as rhyme. Painters rhyme shapes and colors. Poets rhyme terminal syllables, sometimes moods. Robbe-Grillet rhymes events themselves—fits them inside or outside one another like Chinese boxes, like sounds heard in a whispering gallery . . . ””
Madeleine Chapsal - L’Express
“Robbe-Grillet introduced . . . a revolution in reading: in his works, there is no sense of a privileged text. No one, not even the author, has the last word, and nobody could, because there is no last word—or for that matter, first . . . What the author provides, with an extreme precision, an extreme beauty . . . are the elements of scenes. Stereotypes, archetypes, frozen images—it is the reader’s imagination that does the rest.”
New York Times Book Review - Roger Shattuck
"There is a universal principle at work [in Project] . . . I can describe it best as rhyme. Painters rhyme shapes and colors. Poets rhyme terminal syllables, sometimes moods. Robbe-Grillet rhymes events themselves—fits them inside or outside one another like Chinese boxes, like sounds heard in a whispering gallery . . . "
L'Express - Madeleine Chapsal
"Robbe-Grillet introduced . . . a revolution in reading: in his works, there is no sense of a privileged text. No one, not even the author, has the last word, and nobody could, because there is no last word—or for that matter, first . . . What the author provides, with an extreme precision, an extreme beauty . . . are the elements of scenes. Stereotypes, archetypes, frozen images—it is the reader’s imagination that does the rest."
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