FICTION

GHOSTS IN THE MIRROR by Alain Robbe-Grillet (Grove Weidenfeld: $15.95; 174 pp.). Robbe-Grillet recalls his childhood as a pleasant one filled with people and events that never can be fully understood because they’re complicated but firmly embedded in the context of childish simplicity. He muses about how impossible it is to describe anyone’s reality, even one’s own, because for every detail written about, hundreds are ignored: “I pick out a paltry dozen (incidents), each set upon its pedestal, cast in the bronze of a quasi-historical narrative.” Nevertheless, his finely crafted phrases and the convolutions of his thought processes make this a writer’s book. Ever the contrarian, Robbe-Grillet is sure to change his mind, once too many people begin to agree with him. Accepted ideas, he maintains, “fuel the spineless militance of the fashionable journals,” and only when one opposes the mainstream can there be real creativity. He wonders if his autobiography, after all, will be so different from his father’s “painstaking, inaccurate, absurd translation” of Schiller’s complete works; his father spoke not a word of German.