A guide for the adventurous reader to Robbe-Grillet’s labyrinthine and playful world of novels, short stories, and autobiographies.
Emerging early in the 1950s as an articulate and provocative spokesman for the “new novel,” Alain Robbe-Grillet is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading practitioners of experimental narrative. He has reinvented the genre in ways that challenge the conventions of traditional realism, much of the time bewildering readers with his subversion of narrative structure and such staples of traditional fiction as character, plot, and chronology. This introduction to the French writer suggests that, despite the initial shock often felt on a first encounter with Robbe-Grillet, reading his work can be great fun for someone willing to tolerate defamiliarization and ambiguity and to become an interactive traveller through his narrative mazes.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000
