Book Description

The winner of the Prix des Critiques from the French avant-garde author of Jealousy. “Robbe-Grillet is the forerunner of a revolution in the novel” (Claude Mauriac, cultural critic for Le Figaro). 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 homicidal 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. “The suspense . . . keeps us on tenterhooks.” —The New York Times Book Review “I can think of no other writer who can render the banal so fearfully fantastic. In the subtlest, slyest, and most sheerly delightful way he persuades us to look anew at the commonplace.” —Books and Bookmen Praise for Alain Robbe-Grillet “Robbe-Grillet’s theories constitute the most ambitious aesthetic program since Surrealism.” —John Updike, Pulitzer Prize–winner “Robbe-Grillet is important because he has attacked the last bastion of the traditional art of writing: the organization of literary space.” —Roland Barthes, influential literary theorist “Robbe-Grillet was a master at conveying human misunderstanding.” —Bernard-Henri Lévy, public intellectual, author, and filmmaker “I doubt that fiction as art can any longer be seriously discussed without Robbe-Grillet.” —The New York Times