Alain Robbe-Grillet was a leading practitioner of the Nouveau Roman (New Novel), a French literary movement of the 1950s that focused on objects rather than plot, ideas, or narrative. His books remain unique, dense, dark, and compelling today. His novels linger in my mind long after I’ve read them, as I mull over the story that emerges without a linear plot or traditional timeline.
Robbe-Grillet’s books are more like a series of images, a creative documentary from inside a character’s experience, whether in the present, the past, or dreams. It’s up to the reader to decide what’s happening, but to me Robbe-Grillet makes it clear what’s real and who murdered whom.
At times I compare Robbe-Grillet to his fellow Frenchmen Marcel Proust and Albert Camus, in the sense that his fiction exists without judgment. It’s simply present. Although these writers are different in so many ways, my impressions of their books after I’ve read them sometimes seem to belong to the same category.
One of my college professors told our class to read only seven pages of Proust at a time because the writing is so dense and rich. I thought that was a perfect way to read, understand, and enjoy Proust. I don’t recommend reading Robbe-Grillet seven pages at a time, but you should take your time. Both Proust and Robbe-Grillet stay with you through the images and moments of their fictional worlds, even though their subject matter couldn’t be more different.
I’m most familiar with Robbe-Grillet’s first two novels, The Erasers and The Voyeur.
Both are murder mysteries. I read The Voyeur in college. It has stayed with me, and I’ve read it multiple times. The book is full of images as well as clues. You’re inside the head of the protagonist, Mathias. A young girl has been murdered. The figure eight recurs, and so does a rope. Mathias appears to be a complete loner, yet he was born on the island, though he hasn’t been home in a long time. He’s preoccupied with time and with when he arrives and departs. It’s an eerie book full of foggy foreboding, observations, and memories. I believe it’s clear what happened, but everything comes through Mathias, and he seems to have shut down part of himself.
In the second book, The Erasers, the investigator might be the one who committed the crime. I love being in on the secret of what happened, despite the mixture of fact and fantasy, but the literary joy is in the unnerving labyrinth of suspense that Robbe-Grillet leads us through.
Neither book has a traditional narrative; both are more about time and place.
It was Robbe-Grillet’s third novel, Jealousy (1957), that put him on the literary map, thanks to an influential review by the critic Roland Barthes that sparked interest in Robbe-Grillet and established him as an important writer.
I love reading Robbe-Grillet. Despite the ambiguous writing, I find his books compelling and suspenseful. It’s all there in the maze of the protagonists’ minds, which are like all our minds, so it’s easy to relate to their experiences.
Robbe-Grillet was never a bestselling author, but as he said, “usually my books are long-sellers,” meaning that over time his books outsold the bestsellers.
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Books
- Jealousy
- The Voyeur
- Jealousy & In the Labyrinth
- In the LabyrinthFor a New Novel: Essays on … For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
- Djinn
- Last Year at Marienbad
- Project for a Revolution in New York
- Repetition
- Snapshots
- Recollections of the Golden Triangle
- Topology of a Phantom City
- A Sentimental Novel
- Ghosts in the Mirror
- Why I Love Barthes
- Dreams of a Young Girl
- The Secret Room
- Generative Literature and Generative Art: New Essays
- Georges Segal
- Magritte
Quotes
- “The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”
― Alain Robbe Grillet - “the world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it.”
― Robbe-Grillet Alain - “There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: ‘You see,’ he says, ‘now that’s formalism.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet - “When a novelist has “something to say,” they mean a message. It has political connotations, or a religious message, or a moral prescription. It means “commitment,” as used by Sartre and other fellow-travelers. They are saying that the writer has a world view, a sort of truth that he wishes to communicate, and that his writing has an ulterior significance. I am against this.”
— Alain Robbe-Grillet - “I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet - “The word “avant-garde,” for example, despite its note of impartiality, generally serves to dismiss-as though by a shrug of the shoulders-any work that risks giving a bad conscience to the literature of mass consumption.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction - “The writer must proudly consent to bear his own date, knowing that there are no masterpieces in eternity, but only works in history, and that they survive only to the degree that they have left the past behind them and heralded the future.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet - “A new form will always seem more or less an absence of any form at all, since it is unconsciously judged by reference to the consecrated forms.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un Nouveau Roman - “Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.”
- “Memory belongs to the imagination.”
— Alain Robbe-Grillet - Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.”
― Alain Robbe Grillet
Find books by Alain Robbe-Grillet on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
Check out this Alain Robbe-Grillet interview at The Paris Review.
You might enjoy Noovella’s post about Marcel Proust as well as The Best Books Set in Paris.
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