Understanding Alain Robbe-Grillet

Acquaints readers with the complex, unique, and experimental nature of this author

Emerging early in the 1950s as an articulate and provocative spokesman for the "new novel," Alain Robbe-Grillet has remained one of the world's leading practitioners of experimental narrative. He continues to reinvent the genre in ways that challenge the conventions of traditional realism, much of the time bewildering readers and critics with his subversion of narrative structure and of such staples of traditional fiction as character, plot, and chronology. In this introduction to the French writer whose work includes Eraser, Recollections of the Golden Triangle, and Ghosts in the Mirror, Roch C. Smith suggests that despite the initial shock often felt on a first encounter with Robbe-Grillet, reading his work can be great fun for someone willing to tolerate defamiliarization and ambiguity and to become an interactive traveler through his narrative mazes. With this exploration of Robbe-Grillet's novels, short stories, and autobiographies, Smith offers a guide for the adventuresome reader to the writer's labyrinthine and playful world.

Roch C. Smith is the author of books on André Malraux and Gaston Bachelard, a coauthor of a volume on Robbe-Grillet's films, and a professor of French at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.