Books by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Repetition: A Novel
by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Howard
We are in the bombed-out Berlin of 1949, after the Second World War, rendered with an atmosphere reminiscent of Orson Welles’ The Third Man. Henri Robin, a special agent of the French secret service, arrives in the ruined former capital to which he feels linked by a vague but recurrent childhood memory. But the real purpose of his mission has not been revealed to him, for his superiors have decided to afford him only as much information as is indispensable for the action expected of his blind loyalty. But nothing is what it seems, and matters do not turn out as anticipated.
Indeed, the events that punctuate the secret agent’s stay in Berlin are liable to abrupt transitions, thrilling and questionable in equal measure: a shooting, a kidnapping, druggings, encounters with pimps and teenage whores, police interrogations, even some elegantly staged torture. These bloody events take place amid thick fog along the city’s canals, and even more mysterious narrative tricks. Robinor is the narrator actually twin brothers?falls in love with a mysterious woman named Jo Kast (a reference to Oedipus’s mother Jocasta). Her teenaged daughter Gegenecke (the German translation of Antigone), a provocative blonde, will form a strange partnership reminiscent of the blind Oedipus led into exile by Antigone. Dupont, the hero of The Erasers, returns here as van Brucke (both names mean Of the Bridge,” one in French, the other in German). In this astonishing fictional cat-and-mouse game, reminiscent of Daedalus’s labyrinth, nothing that is remembered can be altogether true, but only what is remembered can be real.
Readers of Robbe-Grillet’s novel Erasers will recognize, as the secret agent of Repetition slowly becomes aware that he was in Berlin beforeas a child, with his mother, perhaps looking for his fatherthe same allusions to bits and pieces of the Oedipus story built into the hero’s own. Indeed erasing” a story by retelling it is the central motif of all Robbe-Grillet’s fiction and films, of which this latest and probably last novel is in many ways the most revealing and triumphant version.
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Repetition: A Novel
by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Howard
The French spokesperson for nouveau roman pens a creepy, atmospheric spy novel set in war-ravaged 1949 Berlin as Henri Robin, an agent for the French secret service, embarks on a mission whose real purpose he does not know.
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Two Novels
Here, in one volume, are two remarkable novels by the chief spokesman of the so-called "new novel" which has caused such discussion and aroused such controversy. "Jealousy," said the New York Times Book Review "is a technical masterpiece, impeccably contrived." "It is an exhilarating challenge," said the San Francisco Chronicle. The Times Literary Supplement of London called Robbe-Grillet an "incomparable artist" and the Guardian termed Jealousy "an extraordinary book." In his native France, leading critic Maurice Nadeau wrote in France-Observateur that "In the Labyrinth is better than an excellent novel: it is a great work of literature," and fellow novelist and critic Claude Roy judged the same work Robbe-Grillet's "best book," while here in America the "Parade of Books" column called In the Labyrinth "a highly emotional experience for the reader" and went on to predict: "Robbe-Grillet will take his place in world literature as a successor of Balzac and Proust."
This volume, which offers incisive essays on Robbe-Grillet by Professor Bruce Morrissette of the University of Chicago and by French critics Roland Barthes and Anne Minor, also contains a helpful bibliography of writings by and about the author.
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Jealousy & In the Labyrinth
Here, in one volume, are two remarkable novels by the chief spokesman of the so-called “new novel” which has caused such discussion and aroused such controversy.
This volume, which offers incisive essays on Robbe-Grillet by Professor Bruce Morrissette of the University of Chicago and by French critics Roland Barthes and Anne Minor, also contains a helpful bibliography of writings by and about the author.
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La jalousie
Le narrateur de ce récit – un mari qui surveille sa femme – est au centre de l'intrigue. Il reste d’ailleurs en scène de la première phrase à la dernière, quelquefois légèrement à l’écart d’un côté ou de l’autre, mais toujours au premier plan. Souvent même il s’y trouve seul.Ce personnage n’a pas de nom, pas de visage. Il est un vide au cœur du monde, un creux au milieu des objets. Mais, comme toute ligne part de lui ou s’y termine, ce creux finit par être lui-même aussi concret, aussi solide, sinon plus.L’autre point de résistance, c’est la femme du narrateur, A…, celle dont les yeux font se détourner le regard. Elle constitue l’autre pôle de l’aimant.La jalousie est une sorte de contrevent qui permet de regarder au dehors et, pour certaines inclinaisons, du dehors vers l’intérieur ; mais, lorsque les lames sont closes, on ne voit plus rien, dans aucun sens. La jalousie est une passion pour qui rien jamais ne s’efface : chaque vision, même la plus innocente, y demeure inscrite une fois pour toutes.Publié en 1957 aux Éditions de Minuit, La Jalousie est, comme Les Gommes (« double » n°79), l’un des ouvrages emblématiques du Nouveau Roman et de l’œuvre d’Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008).
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The Voyeur
One of Robbe-Grillet’s most important works and winner of the 1955 Prix des Critiques, The Voyeur tells the gripping story of a thirteen-year-old girl who is found drowned and mutilated. Suspicion surrounds Mathias, a reclusive traveling salesman, and as the circumstances are eerily recreated through the eyes of the suspected killer, the reader is drawn into a haunting mystery. Writing with eerie precision but nonetheless flouting the established rules of fiction, Robbe-Grillet puts us at the scene of the crime and takes us inside the mind of an unreliable narrator penned by an unreliable author.
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Snapshots
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.
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Project for a Revolution in New York (French Literature)
Part prophecy and part erotic fantasy, this classic tale of otherworldly depravity features New York itself―or a foreigner’s nightmare of New York―as its true protagonist. Set in the towers and tunnels of the quintessential American city, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novel turns this urban space into a maze where politics bleeds into perversion, revolution into sadism, activist into criminal, vice into art―and back again. Following the logic of a movie half-glimpsed through a haze of drugs and alcohol, Project for a Revolution in New York is a Sadean reverie that bears an alarming resemblance to the New York, and the United States, that have actually come into being.
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A Sentimental Novel (French Literature)
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.
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