Alain Robbe-Grillet

Jalusi och Stenögonen - minutiösa franska mästerstycken i samlad utgåva»Robbe-Grillet attackerar den traditionella författarkonstens sista bastion: organiserandet av det litterära rummet.« Roland BarthesEn klockförsäljare återvänder till den ö där han tillbringade sin ungdom och utvecklar en besatthet av mordet på en ung flicka. På en bananplantage spionerar en annan man genom fönsterjalusierna på sin hustru och deras tillfällige gäst, alltmedan han förtärs av svartsjuka. I romanerna Stenögonen och Jalusi blir de plågade männens osäkerhet om vad som egentligen rör sig bakom tingens yta också läsarens. Robbe-Grillet skildrar med minutiös precision episoder, föremål, rörelser och händelser men avstår från sammanfattningar och försök till psykologisk analys. Alain Robbe-Grillet kom på 1950-talet - tillsammans med författare som Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor och Claude Simon - att bli företrädare för »den franska nya romanen«, en löst sammanhållen litterär riktning som vände sig mot det traditionella berättandets sentimentalitet och moralism. I denna volym samlas två av hans mest betydelsefulla romaner, i översättning av Eva Alexanderson och med ett nyskrivet förord av Magnus Bergh.ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET [1922-2008] var en fransk författare och filmskapare, ofta betraktad som den franska nya romanens centralfigur. Bland hans filmer märks särskilt I fjol i Marienbad [1961], ett samarbete med regissören Alain Resnais. Stenögonen utkom första gången 1955, Jalusi två år senare.»Litteraturen som konstform kan knappast längre diskuteras på allvar utan Robbe-Grillet.« New York Times

A man tells a woman that they have met before – that they became lovers but then agreed to separate for a year. The year is now up, and he has come back for her. At first, she remembers nothing, but as he relates their past together, real or imaginary, snapshots of memory appear – and she begins to believe him. As more details begin to re-emerge from the woman’s mind, the reader is shunted backwards and forwards between the past and the present, the actual and the illusory, that which is seen and that which is only glimpsed and guessed at. The director Alain Resnais was already famous for films such as Hiroshima, Mon Amour when he asked Alain Robbe-Grillet – the author of several seminal novels, including Jealousy and The Voyeur, and the leader of the Nouveau Roman school – to write a script for him. The result was Last Year at Marienbad, a film that, as well as winning the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, has enthralled the critics, fascinated the public and become one of the greatest cult classics of modern cinema.

Set in an unspecified island kingdom, A Regicide tells the story of the statistician Boris who, after the electoral victory of the Church party in the country’s elections, decides to assassinate the King on the day he is to visit the factory where he is employed. As the crime is described and relived, doubt sets in as to whether it has ever taken place.Written in 1949 but only published in 1979, Robbe-Grillet’s first novel is a disquieting and satirical avant-garde political thriller which bridges the gap between traditional novel and the Nouveau Roman genre he would later espouse and make famous.

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.

When Mathias, a travelling watch salesman, returns after many years to the island of his birth, a young girl is found dead on the rocks. As Mathias makes an increasingly tense recapitulation of his movements on the day of the event, tiny details slowly and inexorably accumulate. Through the warped screen of his distorted mind, the remembered images pile up until the reader is caught in his web of desperation. And yet in the end reality has lost all meaning, as the distinction between the narrator’s recollections and the underlying facts are more and more blurred.This brilliantly executed novel, which showcases all the techniques that have secured Robbe-Grillet’s place in the canon of Western literature, leaves behind a disturbing sense of unrest.

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. A soldier, carrying a parcel under his arm, is wandering through an unknown town. All the streets look the same, and he cannot remember the name of one where he was supposed to meet the man who had agreed to take the parcel. But he must deliver the parcel or at least get rid of it…A brilliant work from one of the finest exponents of the Nouveau Roman, In the Labyrinth showcases an inventive, hypnotic style which creates an uncanny atmosphere of déjà vu, yet undermines the reader’s expectations at every turn.

After a failed attempt on his life by an unknown terrorist cell, Professor Daniel Dupont decides to fake his own death. The government authorities, believing that the attack is part of a series of political assassinations, send Wallas, a recently promoted special investigator, to the provincial town where the crime took place. As he wanders the confusing streets of the town, he finds himself increasingly lost in a web of conspiracies, doppelgängers and memories.Cleverly deconstructing the detective genre, The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first published novel, shifts between various characters and time frames, while maintaining the suspense of a conventional thriller. The result is an engrossing examination of consciousness and reality which is also one the founding texts of the nouveau roman school.

A collection of two remarkable short novels that epitomize the project of the nouveau roman, Jealousy and In the Labyrinth brings the reader into a world where physical space and time bend and change, where a jalousie window blind resonates with the envy of a jealous husband, and where a soldier making a journey finds himself moving in circular time.

In his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principal preoccupation: the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation, and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in person, never speaks and never acts. He is a point of observation, his personality only to be guessed at, watching every movement of the other characters’ actions as they flash like moving pictures across the distorting screen of a jealous mind.The result is one of the most important and influential books of our time, a completely integrated masterpiece that has already become a classic.

The full French text is accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

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.

The literary friendship between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes lasted 25 years. Everything attests to their deep and mutual intellectual esteem: their private correspondence, their published texts, their conversations - notably in the famous dialogue which gives its name to this work. Robbe-Grillet freely said he had very few true friends but, next to the publisher Jérôme Lindon, he always cited the name of Roland Barthes. In 1980, he wrote his own 'I love, I don't love', published here for the first time, thinking about his friend. In 1985, he predicted: 'It is his work as a writer which will remain'. Ten years later, in 1995, he imagined him as an impatient, blithe novelist, merrily rewriting - 'euphorically, with inexhaustible happiness' - The Sorrows of Young Werther. This small collection of conversations and short texts by Robbe-Grillet is like the deferred echo of those that Roland Barthes dedicated to him in his Critical Essays in 1964. It offers fresh insight into the development of Robbe-Grillet's own work as well as that of Barthes, and is a unique testimony to one of the most important literary friendships of our time.

The literary friendship between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes lasted 25 years. Everything attests to their deep and mutual intellectual esteem: their private correspondence, their published texts, their conversations - notably in the famous dialogue which gives its name to this work. Robbe-Grillet freely said he had very few true friends but, next to the publisher Jérôme Lindon, he always cited the name of Roland Barthes. In 1980, he wrote his own 'I love, I don't love', published here for the first time, thinking about his friend. In 1985, he predicted: 'It is his work as a writer which will remain'. Ten years later, in 1995, he imagined him as an impatient, blithe novelist, merrily rewriting - 'euphorically, with inexhaustible happiness' - The Sorrows of Young Werther. This small collection of conversations and short texts by Robbe-Grillet is like the deferred echo of those that Roland Barthes dedicated to him in his Critical Essays in 1964. It offers fresh insight into the development of Robbe-Grillet's own work as well as that of Barthes, and is a unique testimony to one of the most important literary friendships of our time.

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. Robin--or 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 before--as a child, with his mother, perhaps looking for his father--the 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.

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 his most accessible fiction.

A young man follows an androgynous girl into a clandestine world where he experiences doubts about his own identity, and Lady Ava's Blue Villa in Hong Kong becomes the center of crime, intrigue, and passion

Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the leaders of the new French literary movement of the sixties, has long been regarded as the outstanding writer of the nouveau roman, as well as its major spokesman. For a New Novel reevaluates the techniques, ethos, and limits of contemporary fiction. This is a work of immense importance for any discussions of the history of the novel and for contemporary thinking about the future of fiction.

The full French text is accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.