Jealousy & In the Labyrinth

Although Alain Robbe-Grillet's experimentations with literature are very of their time, this pairing of novels still seduces the reader with its formal play, its power of description, and its mystery. Jealousy is a winding, repetitious story of an unnamed (almost unthought), jealous lover who spies on a woman (only named A...), and a workman she may be having an affair with on a banana plantation. In the Labyrinth depicts a wounded soldier with a wrapped parcel, as he finds (despite many detours) to try to deliver the box in an anonymous village. Playing with the tropes of realism (in way the experiment is a kind of reducto ad absurdam of scientific objectivism), Robbe-Grillet reduces his characters to positionality, relation, and action, cutting out all interiority and intentionality. Tiresome reading in translation, at times, but extraordinary all the same.

JealousyFor some, this book will be a struggle. The pace is tediously slow, the conflict is predictable, and the climax is benign. But, if you're an aspiring author or a bibliophile, you will appreciate and learn a great deal from the painstakingly acute descriptions.I'm not joking when I say the illustration and characterizations are nothing short of amazing; he captures every element of the scene, down to the shadow, with such precision that you feel you are in the room.In the LabyrinthIn the Labyrinth is much the same, with Robbe-Grillet setting a very detailed description. To me this novel is reminiscent of some of his movies, subtly evocative, and artistically complex, and deeply philosophical.Modern authors are mostly content skipping the painstaking work of description, which is a shame. Both are tremendously useful studies in elements of style and substance.I'm speaking of both the French and the English versions, as both are wonderful.

Of all the books I have had to read for a Postmodern Literature class, this is the only one I can say that I honestly liked. I only had to read Jealousy for the class, but I do intend on reading In The Labyrinth when the semester is over and I have more time for leisurely reading. I suggest not reading the introductory essays before reading Jealousy at the very least, so as to not have your perception coloured by what others think is going on. After having read the story myself, and then the essays about the story, I found myself disagreeing with the assumptions made by the essayists. But, so as to not accidentally colour any perceptions myself, I will leave it at "I disagreed".

I purchased Jealousy for one of my best friends because I wanted him to experience Grillet's unique writing style. When I first read Jealousy I was blown away by the style; it is like no other! The way this author builds tension without ever placing us inside any character's mind is incredible. This is a must read for any writer.

Read this for a book club. Very hard to get into due to Robbe-Grillet's use of decriptive images of people, objects, and nature in the novel several times over and over. This may be his way of presenting the characters, and situations to give you an image of what was happening in the novel, but you had to shift through all the descriptive writing without the use of adjectives to understand what he was trying to convey. I pushed myself to read this book hoping it would get better and I would be able to get something out of it. The best thing was just getting out of this book.

Jealousy is unique, and a real psychological thriller structured like no other novel.

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.

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.

Jealousy is a landmark in the movement away from conventional narrative and towards a new novel (nouveau roman)

I realise that Robbe-Grillet was celebrated for creating a new genre of novel, but quite honestly I and everyone else in my book club who read it found it really hard to understand and even harder to enjoy..