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Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) was born in Brest, France. He was one of the most important postwar avant-gardist, and along with Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon Robbe-Grillet was a founder of the “New Novelists” or noveau roman literary movement.

His first novel, The Erasers, was published in 1953. As his next novels appeared, (The Voyeur in 1955, Jealousy in 1957, In the Labyrinth in 1959, and La Maison de Rendez-vous in 1965) his importance as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman became apparent. He gives his own theories of the novel in a collection of essays, For a New Novel.

Robbe-Grillet wrote the film script for Last Year at Marienbad.

Praise

“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

“The master of the new novel and . . . the most radical writer of fiction now working in France, or perhaps anywhere.” —Book Week

“Robbe-Frillet was a master at conveying human misunderstanding.” —Bernard-Henri Lévy