books in order

Alain Robbe-Grillet Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Voyeur (1958)
  2. Jealousy (1959)
  3. In the Labyrinth (1960)
  4. Last Year At Marienbad (1962)
  5. The Erasers (1966)
  6. The House of Assignation (1970)
  7. The Immortal One (1971)
  8. Project for a Revolution in New York (1972)
  9. La Belle Captive (1976)
  10. Topology of a Phantom City (1977)
  11. Dreams of Young Girls (1980)
  12. Djinn (1982)
  13. Recollections of the Golden Triangle (1984)
  14. Ghosts in the Mirror (1988)
  15. A Regicide (1999)
  16. Angelique (2000)
  17. Repetition (2003)

Omnibus

  1. Jealousy / In the Labyrinth (2018)

Collections

  1. Snapshots (1966)

Non fiction

  1. For a New Novel (1965)
  2. Rendez-vous (1981)
  3. Generative Literature and Generative Art (1983)
  4. The Erotic Dream Machine (2006)
  5. In the Temple of Dreams (2008)
  6. Why I Love Barthes (2011)

Novels Book Covers

Omnibus Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Alain Robbe-Grillet Books Overview

The Voyeur

Mathias, a timorous, ineffectual traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth after a long absence. Two days later, a thirteen year old girl is found drowned and mutilated. With eerie precision, Robbe Grillet puts us at the scene of the crime and takes us inside Mathias’s mind, artfully enlisting us as detective hot on the trail of a homocidal maniac. A triumphant display of the techniques of the new novel, The Voyeur achieves the impossible feat of keeping us utterly engrossed in the mystery of the child s murder while systematically raising doubts about whether it really occurred.

Jealousy

The full French text is accompanied by French English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

In the Labyrinth

The Battle of Reichenfels has been fought and lost. The army is in flight. The enemy is expected to arrive in town at any moment. Wandering through the snow laden devastated streets of what once was a city, a soldier on the losing side has a parcel to deliver. All the streets look the same, and he cannot remember the name of the street where he was to meet the man who had agreed to take the parcel. But he must deliver the parcel or at least get rid of it…
Alain Robbe Grillet says in his prefatory note: ‘this story is fiction, not a report. It describes a reality which is not necessarily that of the reader’s own experience…
And yet the reality here in question is srictly physical, that is to say it has no allegorical significance. The reader should therefore see in it only objects, the gestures, the words and the events that are told, without seeking to give them either more or less meaning than they would have in his own life, or in his death.’ The masterful translation is by Christine Brooke Rose.

The Erasers

Alain Robbe Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty four hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin. Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.

La Belle Captive

‘It begins with a stone falling, in the silence, vertically, immobile. It is falling from a great height, a meteor, a massive, compact, oblong block of rock, like a giant egg with a pocked, uneven surface.’ The opening sentence of La Belle Captive introduces a dreamworld where the conventions of the traditional novel have been overthrown. Objects move through space without regard to laws of nature, characters move through the text in a maddening complex of events. Published in 1975, Alain Robbe Grillet’s nouveau roman is illustrated with 77 paintings by Ren Magritte. Robbe Grillet uses Magritte’s paintings as pretexts for the novel, letting them generate themes for an imaginary discourse that parallels their imagery, glosses them, contradicts them. Simultaneously, he comments on Magritte’s paintings while taking advantage of them to parade his own favorite themes: play, eroticism, subversion. Robbe Grillet gives us a plot that frustrates expectations yet shares his pleasure with the mysterious and poetic in Magritte’s art, and with the cultural myths that painter and novelist both parody. The book includes a critical essay by novelist and translator Ben Stoltzfus on the pictorial and linguistic affinities between Magritte and Robbe Grillet. Stoltzfus explores the image of the beautiful captive not only in her mythical and erotic dimensions, but also as a metaphor for the artistic process.

Recollections of the Golden Triangle

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.

Repetition

Alain Robbe Grillet’s novels groundbreaking works combining suspense fiction, high literature, and philosophical exploration have made him one of the most influential writers of the last half century. Repetition, the first novel he has written in twenty years, is a triumphant accomplishment, an extraordinary tale of violence, espionage, and tricks of perception. Set in the bombed out Berlin of 1949 and rendered with an atmosphere reminiscent of Orson Welles’s The Third Man, Repetition follows Henri Robin, a special agent of the French secret service who arrives in the ruined city, to which he feels linked by a vague but recurrent memory. The real purpose of his mission has not been revealed to him, and nothing is what it seems. There is a shooting, a kidnapping, druggings, encounters with pimps and teenage who*res, police interrogations, even torture. As Robin slowly becomes aware that he was in Berlin before as a child, with his mother, perhaps looking for his father bits and pieces of the Oedipus story resonate through the book’s elegant labyrinth. Repetition may be the most revealing and triumphant novel the French master has yet written.

For a New Novel

This is a work by the French author Alain Robbe Grillet, translated from the original French.

Why I Love Barthes

The literary friendship between Alain Robbe Grillet and Roland Barthes lasted 25 years. Everything attests to their deep and mutual intellectual esteem: their private correspondence, their published texts, their conversations notably in the famous dialogue which gives its name to this work. Robbe Grillet freely said he had very few true friends but, next to the publisher J r me Lindon, he always cited the name of Roland Barthes. In 1980, he wrote his own I love, I don t love , published here for the first time, thinking about his friend. In 1985, he predicted: It is his work as a writer which will remain . Ten years later, in 1995, he imagined him as an impatient, blithe novelist, merrily rewriting euphorically, with inexhaustible happiness The Sorrows of Young Werther. This small collection of conversations and short texts by Robbe Grillet is like the deferred echo of those that Roland Barthes dedicated to him in his Critical Essays in 1964. It offers fresh insight into the development of Robbe Grillet’s own work as well as that of Barthes, and is a unique testimony to one of the most important literary friendships of our time.

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