Customer Reviews

La Jalousie (French Edition)

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I read Jalousie in college, over 20 years ago, and still think of it with great affection. It is a novel of obsession by an author equally obsessed with technique and perspective, and if you submit to it it is hypnotizing. We pretend, in our 'real lives' to see in three dimensions, and to understand the people around us as well, but jalousie makes the case that we are really very limited in what we actually know -we are like a paranoid man peering at the world through the slats of the blinds that cover our windows: we can only guess the true shape of the world, the actual motivations of people. From this perspective everyone's motives are suspect, and paranoia blooms in the heat of this banana plantation, into madness. My favorite image, recalled 20 years since I have read the work, is the monstrous centipede on the wall: first there, then smashed into the wallpaper, then the stain of its presence, and over and over again. Robbe-Grillet, given your willingness to submit, crawls into your consciousness like this luscious, preposterously large, poisonous insect.

This novel goes in a direction very different from other novels that I've read in the past. The characters are never really defined, the narrator never acknowledges his own identity, and there is no linear plot at all. Although it may be interesting to figure out "what really happened," that doesn't seem to be a concern as you're reading. The portrait of jealousy itself is what makes the novel fascinating, and the special connection between the word for "blinds" in French and the word for, well, "jealousy" adds some interesting levels of meaning.

This edition is particularly useful for non-native French readers, as it explains the novel in the introduction and also provides a glossary in the back pages.

I read Jalousie in college, over 20 years ago, and still think of it with great affection. It is a novel of obsession by an author equally obsessed with technique and perspective, and if you submit to it it is hypnotizing. We pretend, in our 'real lives' to see in three dimensions, and to understand the people around us as well, but jalousie makes the case that we are really very limited in what we actually know -we are like a paranoid man peering at the world through the slats of the blinds that cover our windows: we can only guess the true shape of the world, the actual motivations of people. From this perspective everyone's motives are suspect, and paranoia blooms in the heat of this banana plantation, into madness. My favorite image, recalled 20 years since I have read the work, is the monstrous centipede on the wall: first there, then smashed into the wallpaper, then the stain of its presence, and over and over again. Robbe-Grillet, given your willingness to submit, crawls into your consciousness like this luscious, preposterously large, poisonous insect.

This is by no means a story in the classical sense. Almost without exception, everything we learn is what the main narrator tells us and he basically confines himself to describing the scenes surrounding and tangential to the mainly untold plot. The narration of the `story' is continually broken off only to be repeated in almost the same words. Again and again the narrator devotes himself to the neurotically precise description of objects around him. I interpret this as an escape by the narrator from the further development of the truncated plot fragments. The narrator seems to be tormented and psychologically paralysed as this is obviously the story of a moribund relationship and thinly veiled deceit.
This is not your regular jolly-old read but there is something about this book that lingers on long after the plot of a more conventional novel is forgotton. There is something here that seeps osmotically into the consciousness and remains like memories of undramatic moments in human life.

One of the best and most mysterious novels ever. It is the most psychological of novels because there is no psychology involved in interpreting the events.