About The Book

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.

Praise

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

“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