Robert Penget (1920-1997) - French avant-garde artist, novelist and playwright, best known as a representative of the “new novel”. The novel “Inquiry” is perhaps the most significant work of Penget, in which he summarized his creative searches. This is, first of all, a stylistic and grammatical experiment, a strange narrative without beginning or end, without a plot core, any organized plot, and even practically without punctuation marks. This is a virtual world inhabited by people who are like us: smart and stupid, cheerful and sad, happy and not so happy. And it is born not in the memory of some super-powerful computer, but in the imagination of an elderly and, at first glance, simple-minded person. And in order to lure you into this world, to make it familiar and close, the author uses a cunning trick - a pseudo-detective intrigue.