Alain Robbe-Grillet

When Mathias, a traveling watch salesman, returns after many years to the island of his birth, a young girl is found dead on the rocks, having been brutally raped and murdered. Slowly and inexorably the tiny details accumulate as Mathias makes an increasingly tense recapitulation of his movements on the day of the crime. Through the warped screen of his distorted mind the remembered images pile up until the reader is caught in his web of desperation. And yet in the end reality has lost all meaning. Did the crime only exist in the mind of Mathias?This brilliantly executed novel, using all the techniques that have made Robbe-Grillet's works unique, leaves behind a disturbing sense of unrest.

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 strictly 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.'

In his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principle preoccupation, the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in person, never speaks and never acts. He is a point of observation, his personality only to be guessed at, watching every movement of the other two characters' actions and events as they flash like moving pictures across the distorting screen of a jealous mind. The result is one of the most important and influential books of our time, a completely integrated masterpiece that has already become a classic.

After a failed attempt on his life by an unknown terrorist cell, Professor Daniel Dupont decides to fake his own death with the help of Doctor Juard. The government authorities, believing that the attack is part of a series of political assassinations, send Wallas, a recently promoted special investigator, from Paris to the provincial town where the crime took place, which by coincidence he visited as a child. As he wanders the confusing streets of the town, he finds himself increasingly lost in a web of conspiracies, doppelgangers and memories. Cleverly deconstructing the detective-fiction genre, "The Erasers", Alain Robbe-Grillet's first published novel, shifts between various narrators and time frames, while maintaining the suspense of a conventional thriller. The result is an engrossing examination of consciousness and reality which is also one of the founding texts of the Nouveau Roman school.

Set in an unspecified island kingdom, A Regicide tells the story of the statistician Boris who, after the electoral victory of the Church party in the country's elections, decides to assassinate the King on the day he is to visit the factory where he is employed. As the crime is described and relived, doubt sets in as to whether it has ever taken place. Written in 1949 but only published in 1979, Robbe-Grillet's first novel is a disquieting and satirical avant-garde political thriller which bridges the gap between traditional novel and the nouveau roman genre he would later espouse and make famous.

Berlín, noviembre de 1949. HR, agente de escaso rango de un servicio francés de inteligencia, llega a la antigua capital en ruinas. Se siente ligado a la ciudad por vagos recuerdos de la infancia. Ha venido para llevar a cabo una mision, pero sus jefes no han creido necesario revelarle su verdadero sentido. Y las cosas no suceden como se habia previsto... La ultima novela de uno de los grandes autores contemporaneos.

Prisionero en un laberinto de falsas significaciones, el detective Wallas se debate con distintas versiones e interpretaciones de un crimen, en un juego sutil, equívoco y cruel. Las gomas: una doble investigación, sobre el crimen y sobre el sospechoso detective, en un universo asfixiante, en pos de una cierta verdad inconfesable. Al final, Wallas se verá burlado por una trampa circular, culpable por haber intentado buscar un sentido a las cosas

La pequeña joya que nace de la prolongada amistad literaria entre Robbe-Grillet y Roland Barthes se prolongó durante veinticinco años. Son innumerables las muestras de su profunda y mutua estima intelectual: su correspondencia privada, sus textos publicados como las conversaciones que mantuvieron sobre todo en el famoso dialogo que da titulo a esta obra. Aunque Robbe-Grillet afirmaba que tenia muy pocos amigos, en la lista nunca faltaba al lado de Jerome Lindon, el nombre de Roland Barthes. En 1985, pronosticaba: Es su obra de escritor lo que perdurara. Diez años mas tarde, en 1995, lo imagina con las trazas de novelista, impaciente, alegre, divertido con la reescritura, la euforia lo mueve. Embargado por una dicha inagotable, Las penas del joven Werther... Estos textos de Robbe-Grillet son como el eco diferido de los que Roland Barthes le dedico en 1964 en sus Ensayos criticos.

Estos escritos de Robbe-Grillet, que van de 1953 a 1963, tratan de pensar en este meollo experimental, vivo, las condiciones en que se despliega la Nueva Novela; la que ya vivía en Proust, Joyce, Kafka y Flaubert, y que luego encontramos en Beckett, Roussel, Bousquet, y otros.