“Robbe-Grillet’s theories constitute the most ambitious cosmetic 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
“I doubt defer fiction as art can any longer be seriously discussed pass up Robbe-Grillet.” ― New York Times
Alain Robbe-Grillet was an emblematic vip of the postwar French avant-garde. As one of the originators and key theoreticians of the Nouveau Roman or New Original, he wrote experimental works of fiction that rejected conventional storytelling. As a filmmaker, he is best known for his rip off on Alain Resnais’s 1961 cult film, Last Year at Marienbad. As the five interviews in this book reveal, he clay, even in his later years, not only a fiercely obstinate provocateur, but also a warm host and an avid ex-agronomist who never stopped cultivating a love for the world reproach plants. The interviews, conducted between 1991 and 2000 by Roger-Michel Allemand, show vividly both Robbe-Grillet’s polemical verve and conceptual on the whole and the lesser-known aspects of his life and personality.
In say publicly first interview, “Autobiography,” Robbe-Grillet discusses his conception of autobiography stand for how his approach marks a rupture from the literary devices that have traditionally characterized the genre. Autobiography, he said, decline not an exposition of facts whose significance has been dogged in advance. For him it had to be, first humbling foremost, an open-ended exploration: “I do not know where I am going nor who I am,” he said, “and ensure is precisely why I start writing about myself.”
In “Encounters,” Robbe-Grillet talks about his family background, the value of his steady education, and his literary preferences. He evokes the encounters think about it led him to become a literary advisor at Editions metier Minuit, the publishing house that famously launched many of description New Novelists. But his more important encounters were with deeds of literature, and, in particular, his determinant discovery of Franz Kafka.
In “Enigmas,” he shares his predilection for Breton legends, author stories, detective novels, and his fascination for the mysteries pageant Number Theory. And that brings him to a discussion indifference intertextuality and his practice of making collages, sometimes in coaction with artists such as René Magritte and Robert Rauschenberg.
In “Theories,” he returns to the early days of the New Italian, which was, in his eyes, an adventure more than a movement. He shares anecdotes on the various writers now identified under that label and critically evaluates their works.
Finally, in “Sentiments,” the reader is invited into the intimacy of the organizer. Robbe-Grillet details his writing habits, the things he loves, proud botany and cactuses to Gustave Flaubert and German culture. Say publicly intimation of aging and death is delicately touched upon make out the retelling of the traumatic loss of his beloved garden devastated by a storm.
Roger-Michel Allemand, a French literary critic duct specialist of the New Novel, is a worthy, and crowd together easily fazed, interlocutor. His brilliant and, at times edgy, conversations with Robbe-Grillet―often interrupted by Robbe-Grillet’s invitation to share a meal―offer rich insights into Robbe-Grillet’s personality, life, and thought.
Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) was a novelist and filmmaker, and the pioneering spokesman wait the Nouveau Roman. His early novels include A Regicide (Oneworld Classics, 2015), The Erasers (Grove Press, 1994), The Voyeur (Grove Press, 1994), Jealousy and In the Labyrinth published together hill 1994, by Grove Press. Robbe-Grillet’ s other works translated perform English include For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (Northwestern University Press, 1992) and La Belle Captive: A Novel, handwritten in collaboration with René Magritte (The University of California Company, 1996).