Alain Robbe-Grillet

A Novel

Jealousy

Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin. Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.

The Erasers

Le Voyeur

This is a work by the French author Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated from the original French.

Essays on Fiction

For a New Novel

Mathias, an unsuccessful traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth after some thirty-five years' absence. Two days alter, a thirteen-year-old girl is found drowned, her body mutilated by spider crabs. The reader's attention is invaded by Mathias's perceptions, movements, and visions, until he finds himself inside the mind of a homicidal maniac. Yet even when the story reaches its terrible climax of rape and murder, there is still some doubt as to when, or even if, the crime has been committed.--Cover

The Voyeur

Richard Howard

New York City's crime world and drug culture provides the setting for ritual murder and sadistic orgies in this modern French novel

Project for a Revolution in New York; A Novel.

In France, Alain Robbe-Grillet's final novel was sold in shrink-wrap, labeled with a sticker warning readers that this perverse fairy tale might offend certain sensibilities. It tells the story of Gigi, also known as Djinn, who is being schooled by her father to be a perfect slave and mistress. Running the gamut of unacceptable subject matter from incest to torture, this book abounds with vignettes that explore taboos and their representation in fiction, from the Brothers Grimm to the Marquis de Sade. It is titillating and disgusting, the work of a dirty old man or brilliant agent provocateur -- or both.

A Sentimental Novel

Two Novels (Robbe-Grillet, Alain)

La Maison de Rendez-Vous and Djinn

Bruce Morrissette

Alain Robbe-Grillet has long been regarded as the chief spokesman for the controversial nouveau roman. This collection of brilliant short pieces introduces the reader to those techniques employed by Robbe-Grillet in his longer works. These intriguing, gemlike stories represent Robbe-Grillet's most accessible fiction.

Snapshots

Topology of a Phantom City

The Battle of Reichenfels has been fought and lost. The army is in flight. The enemy is expected to arrive in town at any moment. Wandering through the snow laden devastated streets of what once was a city, a soldier on the losing side has a parcel to deliver. All the streets look the same, and he cannot remember the name of the street where he was to meet the man who had agreed to take the parcel. But he must deliver the parcel or at least get rid of it...Alain Robbe-Grillet says in his prefatory note: 'this story is fiction, not a report. It describes a reality which is not necessarily that of the reader's own experience...And yet the reality here in question is srictly physical, that is to say it has no allegorical significance. The reader should therefore see in it only objects, the gestures, the words and the events that are told, without seeking to give them either more or less meaning than they would have in his own life, or in his death.' The masterful translation is by Christine Brooke-Rose.

In the Labyrinth

Les Gommes

“Could be read as the French New Novelist’s tribute to the vibrant Latin American fiction that his own early works helped to inspire” (The New York Times Book Review). A provocative novel by one of the most influential French writers, Recollections of the Golden Triangle is a tour de force: a literary thriller constructed of wildly diverse elements—fantasy and dream, erotic invention, and the stuff of popular fiction and movies taken to its farthest limits. A secret door that is opened slightly by an electronic device, a beautiful hanged factory girl, a pale young aristocrat whose blood apparently nourishes his vampiric lover, the evil Dr. Morgan who conducts his experiments in “tertiary dream behavior,” the beautiful and sinister women from the world of horror films, and the investigating police, who are not all what they seem to be, are just some of the ingredients of this intriguing new novel by the French master of the intellectual thriller, whose novels and films have effectively changed the way we can look at the “real” world today. Recollections of the Golden Triangle challenges the reader to find his own meaning in its descriptions, clues, and contradictions, and to play detective by assembling the pieces of the fictional puzzle. “If you make the effort [to read Recollections of a Golden Triangle], you will have a richer and more rewarding experience than you would reading a conventional mystery story.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch “A sense of atmosphere and a power of representation that at best make one feel that one is looking over an artist’s shoulder with one eye on the canvas and the other on the reality that he is sketching.” ―The Times

Recollections of the Golden Triangle

Jealousy and In the Labyrinth (Robbe-Grillet, Alain)

Two Novels

Newly reissued with an eye-catching cover by Peter Mendelsund, two remarkable books by legendary avant-garde writer Alain Robbe-Grillet

When a young man joins a strange secret organization and is ordered by the mysterious girl, Djinn, to impersonate a blind man, he searches to discover the purpose of his mission

Djinn

Alain Resnais

A quintessential work of 1960s European art cinema, L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961) was a collaboration between director Alain Resnais and 'New Novel" enfant terrible Alain Robbe-Grillet. Three people, known only by their initials, move through the sprawling luxury of a mysterious hotel and its ornamental gardens. Perhaps M is A's husband and X her lover. Perhaps '"last year," A promised X she would leave with him. Or is there something more terrible in the past? An abstract thriller, a love story, a philosophical puzzle, the film's deviations are, for Jean-Louis Leutrat, as complex as those of the human heart.

Last Year at Marienbad

« C'est en quelque sorte l'ouvre emblématique du Nouveau Roman, et la critique, qui avait lu dans L'Express quelques-uns des textes théoriques que Robbe-Grillet avait publiés, y vit simplement un exercice de style désagréable. Il s'agit en fait de tout autre chose. D'une ouvre autobiographique, d'abord, puisque l'auteur y décrit la maison où lui-même vécut en Martinique et, sans doute, une aventure sentimentale où il jouait le rôle de Franck. Il y est longuement question d'une plantation de bananiers ; on sait que Robbe-Grillet, ingénieur-agronome, est spécialiste des maladies de cet arbre. Le contraire, donc, d'une littérature désincarnée, desséchée, mathématique.
Pourtant le roman déconcerte, par la minutie schizophrénique des descriptions de l'espace (les fenêtres, la terrasse, les quinconces de la plantation, la trace du mille-pattes écrasé sur la cloison), les reprises de chaque épisode, de chaque observation, le remplacement de toutes les notions temporelles par des notions spatiales, ou, mieux, le traitement des unes selon le mode des autres. On ne remarqua pas que, tout comme dans Le Voyeur, l'énigme, ici plus clairement, tourne autour d'un instant « volé », comme la lettre d'Edgar Poe : la nuit de Franck et de A.
Le livre donne lui-même sa clé : « Ces répétitions, ces infimes variantes, ces coupures, ces retours en arrière peuvent donner lieu à des modifications - bien qu'à peine sensibles - entraînant à la longue fort loin du point de départ. » Autre facteur d'étrangeté : comme Godard, Robbe-Grillet se soucie fort peu de la « vraisemblance » du montage, et atteint, du coup, une étonnante efficacité dans le suspense, l'agressivité d'un drame toujours repoussé dans les marges. »

Alain Robbe-Grillet

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