The Voyeur - Softcover

Robbe-Grillet, Alain

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802131654 ISBN 13: 9780802131652

Publisher: Grove Press, 1994

Synopsis

Mathias, a timorous, ineffectual traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth after a long absence. Two days later, a thirteen-year-old girl is found drowned and mutilated. With eerie precision, Robbe-Grillet puts us at the scene of the crime and takes us inside Mathias’s mind, artfully enlisting us as detective hot on the trail of a homocidal maniac. A triumphant display of the techniques of the “new novel,” The Voyeur achieves the impossible feat of keeping us utterly engrossed in the mystery of the child’s murder while systematically raising doubts about whether it really occurred.

About this title

About the Author

Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) was a prominent postwar avant-garde novelist and filmmaker. He was a founder of the Noveau Roman literary movement, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. He is the author of The Erasers, The Voyeur, Jealousy, In the Labyrinth, Recollections of the Golden Triangle, and La Maison de Rendez-vous.

Review

Praise for Alain Robbe-Grillet:

“Robbe-Grillet’s theories constitute the most ambitious aesthetic program since Surrealism.”―John Updike

“Robbe-Grillet is important because he has attacked the last bastion of the traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space”―Roland Barthes

“Alain Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution more radical than Romanticism and Naturalism were in their time.”―Claude Mauriac

“Robbe-Grillet was a master at conveying human misunderstanding.”―Bernard-Henri Lévy

“I doubt that fiction as art can any longer be seriously discussed without Robbe-Grillet.”―New York Times

“Jealousy . . . is a technical masterpiece, impeccably contrived.”―New York Times Book Review

“In the Labyrinth is better than an excellent novel: it is a great work of literature.”―Maurice Nadeau, France-Observateur

“A highly emotional experience for the reader . . . Robbe-Grillet will take his place in world literature as a successor of Balzac and Proust.”―Parade of Books, on In the Labyrinth

“The suspense, built up by skillful near-repetition, keeps us on tenterhooks.”―Justin O’Brien, New York Times Book Review, on The Voyeur

“I can think of no other writer who can render the banal so fearfully fantastic. In the subtlest, slyest, and most sheerly delightful way her persuades us to look anew at the commonplace.”―Jonathan Meades, Books and Bookmen, on The Voyeur

“A haunting, mystifying evocation of a murder that will keep your attention riveted.”―Dallas Morning News

“[Recollections of a Golden Triangle] could be read as the French New Novelist’s tribute to the vibrant Latin American fiction that his own early works helped to inspire . . . Brilliant and hypnotic . . . A finely wrought example of a master’s art.”―William W. Stowe, New York Times Book Review

“If Robbe-Grillet wants us to realize how tenuous the link is between past and present, reality and dream, and the tricks time plays on memory, he succeeds on all counts . . . If you make the effort [to read Recollections of a Golden Triangle], you will have a richer and more rewarding experience that 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.”―Times (London), on Recollections of a Golden Triangle

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0802131654
• ISBN 13: 9780802131652
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224