Customer Reviews

Two Novels: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth (Robbe-Grillet, Alain)

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This book contains two great books by a great author unafraid to do something completely different--a guy who could write a (good) characterless short story about an escalator, or a murder mystery that never uses the letter E, or...or..."Jealousy." Of the two novels contained in this book, "Jealousy" is by far the best.
When I first read "Jealousy," I had never read anything else like it--because there is nothing else like it.
For starters, the book is written in first person, yet it never uses the words I, me, my, mine, we, our, or us, or any other first person posessives. When it's time for dinner, instead of saying, "And now we sit down to eat," the author says something like "And now it is time for dinner," and he describes there being three plates, and mentions two other people eating.
Also, the book is incredibly precise in its details. It names every tree in a bananna forest, spends pages describing a woman brushing her hair, and meticulously records where every shadow in every corner of every room falls, to the point that if he hasn't yet described a part of a room, you wonder, "Well, what's in THAT corner?"
As a result of this unique perspective, and of the author's close attention to detail, the reader forgets the story is in first person at all, and grows to trust the book as an exact, almost scientific account of everything going on.
But, what's going on isn't science--it's an affair. It's the narrator's wife having an affair with a neighbor, in a hot, foreign, plantation-style setting. As the narrator gets more suspicious and prejudiced, so does the reader. As the narrator gets more distrustful and angry, so do you.
This book is brilliant--it's French experimentalism at its best. It explores themes of love and identity and jealousy and reality (despite its author claiming he wants the reader not to find any intended symbolism in it, but only to observe it as one would real life). It's antilinear and unconventional, and explores several dark motifs, such as a squashed centipede on a wall that seems more and more violent with every mention, and with every moment passed in the narrator's growing rage and paranoia.
The second book in this collection is "In the Labyrinth," and it's good as well, though not as instantly gripping or startlingly original. It tells the story of a wounded soldier wandering through the maze of a wartime city's streets, anxious to deliver an important package. It's not as wonderful or as haunting as "Jealousy" is, but it's a good novel nonetheless, and it'll stay with you.
At times both of these books are hard to read, but they're always worth it, and they're always genius. Especially "Jealousy." Buy it, but it, buy it, buy it. Your mind will never be the same again.

"Jealousy" was one of Nabokov's favourite novels. It doesn't matter whether you like Nabokov as a writer or not. Anyone who reads his lectures on European Literature has to admit that he is more than qualified for talking about the quality of a book. He is extremely picky. He dislikes some major writers (Dostoievsky and Cervantes are just two examples), but the ones he does like are always, and I mean always, classics, or will-be classics. Robbe-Grillet's books demand patience. Things move slow, but there's a reason for that. Unlike most novels, you won't be able to understand completely what's going on in "Jealousy" until you have read the last page. But that's the whole point of this novel, and making the trip in darkness is a worthy experience in this case. In the meantime, the book is filled with passages of great concrete poetry. For example: the characters have finished having dinner some time ago, they are outside a house in a plantation in Africa, outside the circle of light in which they are everything is dark. Franck and A... (a woman) are obviously atracted to each other, but both of them are married:

"I think I'll be getting along," Franck says.
"Oh, don't go," A... replies at once, "it's not late at all. It's so pleasant sitting out here."
If Franck wanted to leave, he would have a good excuse: his wife and child who are alone in the house. But he mentions only the hour he must get up the next morning, without making any reference to Christiane. The same shrill, short cry, which sounds closer, now seems to come from the garden, quite near the foot of the veranda on the east side.
As if echoing it, a similar cry follows, coming from the opposite direction. Others answer these, from higher up, toward the road; then still others, from the low ground.
Sometimes the sound is a little lower, or more prolongued. There are probably different kinds of animals. Still, all these cries are alike; not that their common characteristic is easy to decide, but rather their common lack of characteristics: they do not seem to be cries of fright, or pain, or intimidation, or even love. They sound like mechanical cries, uttered without perceptible motive, expressing nothing, indicating only the existence, the position, and the respective movements of each animal, whose trajectory through the night they punctuate.
"All the same," Franck says, "I think I'll be getting along."

[NOTE: It's the rhythm of his writing what makes Robbe-Grillet a very unique writer. So bear in mind that the effect of this fragment is much more powerful when you read it in context. Robbe-Grillet never rushes over things, he makes you feel the weight of the physical world in a way few writers do -Joyce's Ulysses and Lucretius' The Way Things Are, come to mind].

By Robbe-Grillet, I'd recomend "Jealousy", "The Voyeur" and "Repetition". "The Rubbers" is one of his most often talked about novels, but mainly because it was his first, and the one that introduced his style. But after reading these others you realize it was still only incubating.

These two novels (the author's third and fourth, respectively) make for a pretty good introduction to the strange world of Alain Robbe-Grillet. I tend to think of his books as post-modern detective stories, in which the mystery to be solved is nothing less than existence itself; that the reader often finds himself in the dark is very much to the point. They should be interesting to anyone looking for an off-the-beaten-path read.

"Jealousy" (the better of the two) deals with a love triangle in a remote African plantation... which may or may not be all in the narrator's mind. It's creepy and enigmatic. "In the Labyrinth" is a vaguely Kafkaesque tale about a soldier attempting to deliver a mysterious package in a vast, unnamed city. Admittedly, Robbe-Grillet is not the most approachable of authors, but these densely composed novels amply pay off the attention required to read them.

This volume includes two short novels by Robbe-Grillet, written in the 1950's. The first one, "Jealousy", is a masterpiece. Along with Nathalie Sarraute, ARG founded the "Nouveau Roman" movement, which sought to infuse new life into the art of the novel, which, in their opinion, was moribund. Struggling to find a new narrative form, these authors wrote in an "objective" style, that is, they show the reader barely some of what the characters do and say, but nothing about what they feel or think. They show "scenes", but do not "tell". In "Jealousy", we sneek a peek at a love triangle, real or imaginary, only from the supposedly betrayed husband's point of view. The "action" develops in a banana plantation, specifically in the couple's bungalow, which frequently receives the visits of Franck, a neighbor who prefers their company to that of his wife and kid. They have lunch and dinner together, and in the evenings have a drink on the verandah. But it's only action by two. The husband doesn't appear at all. We guess he is the narrator, or at least that the story is told exclusively from his point of view, but we don't know for sure. The woman and the neighbor talk, but never about the husband, who spies on them constantly, and whose memories jump back and forth obsessively. One day, with the alibi of shopping, the woman goes to town with the neighbor, and the car breaks down...

An experimental novel if ever there was one, this is a perfect example of the very intersting things that can be achieved by a master writer. The style hardly suits longer stories, but in this brief, contained form, it works wonders. The story, apparently simple, is enriched and becomes mysterious thanks to the unique point of view used by the writer. It is like spying, more than reading.

"In the Labyrinth" follows a similar techinque, but with an omniscient narrator. It depicts thas last days of a soldier who comes back from the front with a box which contains the belongings of a dead comrade. He's supposed to give the box to some person, apparently the father, whom he desperately seeks with his last breath, in the identical streets of an unnamed city, a true labyrinth. The atmosphere is totally oppressive, recurring, and discontinuous, just as in many nightmare in which you urgently look for something that constantly eludes you. It is disturbing and also very good, though maybe not as much as "Jealousy".

Born in 1922, the French author Alain Robbe-Grillet upset the literary establishment when in the 1950s he published his nouveau roman, the new novel which dispensed with many fictional conventions, little things like characterization and chronology. Beginning with "The Erasers" in 1953 Robbe-Grillet created stories in which the characters are seen in an impersonal world (heavily-detailed descriptions of inanimate objects), dealing with different events that seem unassociated with each other. There are plots, technically, but they are abstract and become less and less concrete as the story continues. I don't think "progresses" is a proper word for his plots; they continue on to a certain point and then simply stop. In fact, in Robbe-Grillet's case it's not so much a question of "the plot thickens" as "the plot dissolves". Does this mean his books are not approachable? Au contraire, his novels (which have been translated into English by the American poet Richard Howard) are intriguing and extremely readable. "The Erasers" and the later "Repetition" take place in a mysterious dream-like city which is never named, but with its canals, its bicyclists, and its brown cafés bears a resemblance to Amsterdam. The nightmarish "The Voyeur" takes place on an equally mysterious island; and "In the Labyrinth", as its title implies, is set in a maze of city streets and buildings. However his 1957 novel "Jealousy" has a very different location: all the action takes place in a one-storey house set in the midst of a tropical banana plantation. There lives a wife named simply A who often hosts a neighboring planter named Franck with whom she may or may not be having an affair. Their glances and whispers are observed unblinkingly by a third person, evidently A's husband. His name is never mentioned, he is never quoted, and his actions are only barely suggested. It turns out he is, in fact, telling the story. It takes the reader a while to realize that this unique narrative is told in the first person singular and yet the word "I" is never used. This means the mood of the novel becomes quite opaque while its construction becomes almost cinematic (Robbe-Grillet was also a scenarist), flashbacks and flashforwards overlapping in a seemingly random manner. Sometimes a short paragraph seems like a "shot", as when A is described sprawled awkwardly across her bed, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Is she alive? The next paragraph has her busy at some task, and it seems the two paragraphs have no connection, but then the first paragraph could be a flashforward. To complete this movie-like experience, A is often depicted sitting upright in a chair, staring ahead, as though she were in a theater. (Speaking of the cinema, I would wager that Robbe-Grillet has had a strong influence on Christopher Nolan.) Over the decades Robbe-Grillet (who died in 2008) became more accepted by the establishment, eventually becoming himself a member of the conservative Academie Française, an honor denied Balzac and Flaubert in the 19th Century. So completely has Robbe-Grillet entered the mainstream today that "Jealousy" is considered among the best French novels of the 20th Century; but if one takes into account the novel's sharp originality and subtextual power, the establishment's conversion is not surprising.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy (Grove, 1955)

Alain Robbe-Grillet's first two novels, The Erasers and Voyeur, were the best thing to happen to French literature since Apollinaire. Then came Jealousy. It would seem that a suspected love affair between a man's wife and their neighbor would be the perfect subject for an author who obsessively details scenes, going back over them to change small details and keep the reader off his feet, wouldn't it?

Sadly, in practice, it didn't work that way at all. We are given a nameless narrator, his wife A..., and the neighbor, Franck, and the unnamed narrator's obsessive going over of a few particular incidents (the implication is that one of them is presently happening, while the others are things he's going over in his head). There are also a lot of extraneous details about banana trees that were ridiculed in the French press upon the book's first publication.

What made The Erasers and Voyeur different from Jealousy is that they had plots, if odd, meandering ones that didn't really go anywhere. Jealousy is a hundred forty-page set piece, in which nothing happens and to which there is no resolution. Readers of Robbe-Grillet's previous works will not be surprised at the latter, but the former might come as something of a shock. As a short story, or perhaps a novella, Jealousy could have been a chilling, creepily effective little piece on the mind degenerating over obsession; as it stands, it's rather, well, boring. **

I get books partly for their physical feel so that is why the printing quality matters to me. This book has standard average design cover. The inside looks like a bad xerox copy that looks like a make-to-order book. I had ordered another edition of the identical book hoping to regain the lost quality in this edition. I do admit that I had not read the book so my comment should not have any bearing on its content.