With the publication in 1958 of his first novel, Claude Ollier was immediately associated with the group of writers who came to be known in the 1950s and 1960s as the New Novelists. Although these writers (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and others) differed significantly from each other, they shared some important common denominators: a questioning of narrative form, of point of view, of temporality, of representation in fiction. Like his contemporaries, Ollier was interested in fiction's capacity for problematizing its own conventions, while at the same time proposing formal innovations that would challenge the ways in which fiction is usually read, evaluated, and categorized. However, Ollier's work soon took on a configuration that made it both unique and exemplary with respect to the New Novel movement: after completing his second novel in 1961, Ollier decided to link all his novels in an ongoing fictional "cycle" which would form...