Jealousy and In the Labyrinth (Two Novels)

by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robbe-grillet, Richard Howard

Book Overview

Here, in one volume, are two remarkable novels by the chief spokesman of the so-called "new novel" which has caused such discussion and aroused such controversy. This volume, which offers incisive... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080215106X
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Almost too original...but no! Just perfect.

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

"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 hi

Interesting Experimental Fiction

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.