Recollections of the Golden Triangle [Paperback]

Alain Robbe Grillet (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1986

A provocative novel by the most influential living French writer, Recollections of the Golden Triangle is a tour de force: a literary thriller constructed of wildly diverse elements—fantasy and dream, erotic invention, and the stuff of popular fiction and movies taken to its farthest limits.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

A provocative novel by the most influential living French writer, Recollections of the Golden Triangle is a tour de force: a literary thriller constructed of wildly diverse elements--fantasy and dream, erotic invention, and the stuff of popular fiction and movies taken to its farthest limits.

A secret door that is opened slightly by an electronic device, a beautiful hanged factory girl, a pale young aristocrat whose blood apparently nourishes his vampiric lover, the evil Dr. Morgan who conducts his experiments in "tertiary dream behavior," the beautiful and sinister women from the world of horror films, and the investigating police, who are not all what they seem to be, are just some of the ingredients of this intriguing new novel by the French master of the intellectual thriller, whose novels and films have effectively changed the way we can look at the "real" world today.

Recollections of the Golden Triangle challenges the reader to find his own meaning in its descriptions, clues, and contradictions, and to play detective by assembling the pieces of the fictional puzzle.

"Robbe-Grillet's theories constitute the most ambitious aesthetic program since Surrealism."--John Updike

"Alain Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution more radical than Romanticism and Naturalism were in their time."--Claude Mauriac

"A sense of atmosphere and a power of representation that at best make one feel that one is looking over an artist's shoulder with one eye on the canvas and the other on the reality that he is sketching."--The Times (London)

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

Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in 1922 in Brest, France. The Erasers, his first novel, was published in 1953, and 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. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Random House~trade (1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394622758
• ISBN-13: 978-0394622750
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,926,851 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intellectual decadence at its best--a labyrinth of guilty pleasures, February 5, 2008

By 

Mark Nadja "Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore... (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Recollections of the Golden Triangle (Paperback)

A book that reads, alternately, like a detective novel, an erotic snuff fantasy, a bizarre sexual mythology or a dream embodying aspects of all three, *Recollections of the Golden Triangle* is a sensual literary feast in virtually every sense. Lucid and yet lavishly written ((at least in this excellent translation)), with echoes of Sade by way of Lautremont, *Recollections* lingers lovingly over the most deliciously perverse images, mixing the sacred and the profane with a dark eroticism of the sort that has always throbbed through the seminal vesicles of B-movies, an art form often much closer to the real well-springs of life than the prettied-up picture presented by high culture.

It's maddeningly difficult to summarize this novel--which is partly what makes it so fascinating. It's a lot like viewing a complex and evocative painting--or, better yet, an enigmatic film: non-linear, evasive, shifting viewpoints, time-frames, even the identities of its principle characters, as if the story were being told on several levels at once, which, of course, it is. But to provide you with the barest skeletal outline: young women are disappearing and being found murdered in various locations throughout the ruins of a city by the sea sometime in what seems the future. A detective seeks to solve these crimes--which may or may not be the work of a secret society practicing human sacrifice--at the same time that he seems to be confessing to the crimes in question, or explaining them, or dreaming them.

Among much that is remarkable about this novel is that it holds together, delicate as the fabric of a dream, even though it seems to be created out of nothing at all, nothing, that is, that is stated with any assurance by the narrator or experienced by any of the various characters. What is most stunning about this text, however, is its hyper-visual nature--the arresting tableaux of pseudo-religious eroticism that seems a kind of psychic compression of the sexual elements in myths and fairytales as retold in contemporary detective novels, horror films, and newspaper accounts of the sex crimes of serial killers. It's as if the cumulative force of all these stories we tell to channel our sexual violence into acceptable social forms of behavior have been driven into a wall, leaving the contemporary man amongst the lurid fragments of a stained glass window he can no longer put together in any meaningful way. That stained glass window, by the way, representative of his own consciousness.

*Recollections* is the attempt to construct a new myth--and at the same time illustrative of the utter impossibility of doing so ever again. Still the readers most lasting impression of *Recollections* is of wandering through the underground maze oft-referred to as an element in the text itself, a kind of secret museum of perversity where around any bend one is apt to stumble upon a shocking--albeit mesmerizing and titillating--exhibit of guilty pleasure. It is this labyrinth that ultimately holds the text together...and one soon suspects, our consciousness as well.

Btw...for a short course in everything wrong with American publishing--not to mention the utter absence of real literary, intellectual, and critical culture in this country--check out the Publishers Weekly review of *Recollections* on this page. The only value I've ever derived from Publishers Weekly is to immediately seek out any book that offends and or outrages their delicate sensibilities. Their review here being a case in point.

1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars weird, June 28, 2010

By 

Howard S. Stein - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Recollections of the Golden Triangle (Robbe-Grillet, Alain) (Paperback)

Well.....I like this author, who is definitely not a normal person. And this book is really strange. I got into Robbe Grillet based on something James Sallis wrote (I think Sallis is terrific) and have enjoyed several of his books, but this one is really strange. Some people might think it is pornographic, perhaps both an attraction and the opposite, but I think it is so strange even that aspect becomes ephemeral. Anyway, not my favorite, and I am a broad reader with a high tolerance for weird writing.