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Le Voyeur
Matthias est un voyageur de commerce, spécialisé dans la vente au porte à porte de montres, qui décide de passer la journée dans son île de naissance pour vendre sa marchandise. Méticuleux et précis, il a 6 heures pour faire le tour de l'île et tenter d'écouler ses 99 montres qu'il transporte dans une valise avant de reprendre le bateau qui le ramènera le soir, après trois heures de traversée, chez lui. Tout est organisé, les méthodes, les parcours, les durées. Cette minutie remonte à son enfance où déjà tous les détails prenaient une place importante dans sa vie. Matthias avait notamment la passion des cordelettes qu'il collectionnait. Devenu adulte, il en garde toujours une sur lui, dans la poche de sa canadienne. C'est avec ses montres et sa cordelette qu'il débarque sur l'île et commence sa tournée, jusqu'à la rencontre de la petite Jacqueline, écho d'une lointaine et mystérieuse Violette.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1955
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2942 people want to read
About the author
Alain Robbe-Grillet
102 books431 followersScreenplays and novels, such as
The Erasers
(1953), of French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, affiliated with the New Wave movement in cinema, subordinate plot to the treatment of space and time; directors, such as Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut, led this movement, which in the 1960s abandoned traditional narrative techniques in favor of greater use of symbolism and abstraction and dealt with themes of social alienation, psychopathology, and sexual love.
Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French writer and filmmaker. He was along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon one of the figures most associated with the trend of the Nouveau Roman. Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat #32.
He was married to Catherine Robbe-Grillet (née Rstakian) .
Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in Brest (Finistère, France) into a family of engineers and scientists. He was trained as an agricultural engineer. In the years 1943-44 Robbe-Grillet participated in service du travail obligatoire in Nuremberg where he worked as a machinist. The initial few months were seen by Robbe-Grillet as something of a holiday, since in between the very rudimentary training he was given to operate the machinery he had free time to go to the theatre and the opera. In 1945, Robbe-Grillet completed his diploma at the National Institute of Agronomy. Later, his work as an agronomist took him to Martinique, French Guinea,Guadeloupe and Morocco.
His first novel The Erasers (Les Gommes) was published in 1953, after which he dedicated himself full-time to his new occupation. His early work was praised by eminent critics such as Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. Around the time of his second novel he became a literary advisor for Les Editions de Minuit and occupied this position from 1955 until 1985. After publishing four novels, in 1961 he worked with Alain Renais, writing the script for Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad), and subsequently wrote and directed his own films. In 1963, Robbe-Grillet published For a New Novel (Pour un Nouveau Roman), a collection of previous published theoretical writings concerning the novel. From 1966 to 1968 he was a member of the High Committee for the Defense and Expansion of French (Haut comité pour la défense et l´expansion de la langue française). In addition Robbe-Grillet also led the Centre for Sociology of Literature (Centre de sociologie de la littérature) at the university of Bruxelles from 1980 to 1988. From 1971 to 1995 Robbe-Grillet was a professor at New York University, lecturing on his own novels.
In 2004 Robbe-Grillet was elected to the Académie française, but was never actually formally received by the Académie because of disputes regarding the Académie's reception procedures. Robbe-Grillet both refused to prepare and submit a welcome speech in advance, preferring to improvise his speech, as well as refusing to purchase and wear the Académie's famous green tails (habit vert) and sabre, which he considered as out-dated.
He died in Caen after succumbing to heart problems
Style
His writing style has been described as "realist" or "phenomenological" (in the Heideggerian sense) or "a theory of pure surface." Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace the psychology and interiority of the character. Instead, one slowly pieces together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions. Ironically, this method resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured and the resulting novel resembles the literary
Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French writer and filmmaker. He was along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon one of the figures most associated with the trend of the Nouveau Roman. Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat #32.
He was married to Catherine Robbe-Grillet (née Rstakian) .
Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in Brest (Finistère, France) into a family of engineers and scientists. He was trained as an agricultural engineer. In the years 1943-44 Robbe-Grillet participated in service du travail obligatoire in Nuremberg where he worked as a machinist. The initial few months were seen by Robbe-Grillet as something of a holiday, since in between the very rudimentary training he was given to operate the machinery he had free time to go to the theatre and the opera. In 1945, Robbe-Grillet completed his diploma at the National Institute of Agronomy. Later, his work as an agronomist took him to Martinique, French Guinea,Guadeloupe and Morocco.
His first novel The Erasers (Les Gommes) was published in 1953, after which he dedicated himself full-time to his new occupation. His early work was praised by eminent critics such as Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. Around the time of his second novel he became a literary advisor for Les Editions de Minuit and occupied this position from 1955 until 1985. After publishing four novels, in 1961 he worked with Alain Renais, writing the script for Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad), and subsequently wrote and directed his own films. In 1963, Robbe-Grillet published For a New Novel (Pour un Nouveau Roman), a collection of previous published theoretical writings concerning the novel. From 1966 to 1968 he was a member of the High Committee for the Defense and Expansion of French (Haut comité pour la défense et l´expansion de la langue française). In addition Robbe-Grillet also led the Centre for Sociology of Literature (Centre de sociologie de la littérature) at the university of Bruxelles from 1980 to 1988. From 1971 to 1995 Robbe-Grillet was a professor at New York University, lecturing on his own novels.
In 2004 Robbe-Grillet was elected to the Académie française, but was never actually formally received by the Académie because of disputes regarding the Académie's reception procedures. Robbe-Grillet both refused to prepare and submit a welcome speech in advance, preferring to improvise his speech, as well as refusing to purchase and wear the Académie's famous green tails (habit vert) and sabre, which he considered as out-dated.
He died in Caen after succumbing to heart problems
Style
His writing style has been described as "realist" or "phenomenological" (in the Heideggerian sense) or "a theory of pure surface." Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace the psychology and interiority of the character. Instead, one slowly pieces together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions. Ironically, this method resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured and the resulting novel resembles the literary
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 132 reviews
September 20, 2022
Alain Robbe-Grillet is very careful about details… He describes objects as scrupulously as if he paints a series of still lifes. Memories of the past and the present events are interlaced so smoothly that the sense of reality becomes blurred…
And Alain Robbe-Grillet creates an atmosphere of suspense in quite a special manner: ambiguities, uncertainties, vague hints – all those turn the tale even more mysterious and irreal.
Brains of a criminal work in deviant ways and a criminal mind is a dark place… Is retaliation inevitable?
When he was still a child – perhaps twenty-five or thirty years ago – he had had a big cardboard box, an old shoebox, in which he collected pieces of string. Not any string, not scraps of inferior quality, worn, frayed bits that had been spoiled by overuse, not pieces too short to be good for anything.
This one would have been just right. It was a thin hemp cord in perfect condition, carefully rolled into a figure eight, with a few extra turns wound around the middle. It must be pretty long – a yard at least, perhaps two. Someone had probably dropped it by mistake after having rolled it up for future use – or else for a collection.
And Alain Robbe-Grillet creates an atmosphere of suspense in quite a special manner: ambiguities, uncertainties, vague hints – all those turn the tale even more mysterious and irreal.
Two yards – or a little more – separate the man from the woman. She lifts her timorous face toward him.
At this moment the man opens his mouth, moving his lips as if talking, but nothing can be heard by the observer behind the square panes. The window is too tightly closed; or the noise of the sea behind him, breaking against the reef at the mouth of the cove, is too loud. The man does not articulate his words clearly enough for the syllables to be counted. He has been speaking slowly for some ten seconds – which must be about thirty syllables, perhaps less.
In reply the young woman screams something – four or five syllables – at the top of her lungs, it appears. Yet this time too, nothing can be heard through the glass.
Brains of a criminal work in deviant ways and a criminal mind is a dark place… Is retaliation inevitable?
May 21, 2011
This was the one which convinced me that I didn't have to finish a book if it became as painful as having my toes gnawed off one by one by the neighbour's strange nine-year-old son. I realised the author was the guy who wrote the script for Last Year at Marienbad which is the all time quintessence of French cinematic 60s avant-gardery. Dig the Wikipedia plot summary
Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorientating shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships between the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the château's corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers.
The characters are unnamed in the film; in the published screenplay, the woman is referred to as "A", the first man is "X", and the man who may be her husband is "M".
I'm not saying the book is as bad as the movie, not at all. It's worse. But something happened on page 84, which broke the terrible monotony. I found an insect squashed there. I imagined its last thoughts : Oh no, this is not a large flat black and white flower petal, it's something else... what's that up above me... aargh...
I took the tiny corpse to be a sign saying that if I carried on Alain Robbe-Grillet would squash the life out of me too. Metaphors can be helpful, even obvious ones.
Thank you little dead bug, you did not die in vain.
Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorientating shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships between the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the château's corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers.
The characters are unnamed in the film; in the published screenplay, the woman is referred to as "A", the first man is "X", and the man who may be her husband is "M".
I'm not saying the book is as bad as the movie, not at all. It's worse. But something happened on page 84, which broke the terrible monotony. I found an insect squashed there. I imagined its last thoughts : Oh no, this is not a large flat black and white flower petal, it's something else... what's that up above me... aargh...
I took the tiny corpse to be a sign saying that if I carried on Alain Robbe-Grillet would squash the life out of me too. Metaphors can be helpful, even obvious ones.
Thank you little dead bug, you did not die in vain.
July 16, 2017
This was my first experience with the nouveaux romans of Robbe-Grillet, and it's a tough one for me to rate, as I had no idea what was happening half the time. Okay, most of the time. All I know for certain is that a traveling watch salesman returns to his small hometown island in order to sell as many watches as he can in the few short hours allotted to him (if he misses the ferry back he'll be stranded for days). A murder of a young girl happens while he's there, for which he may or may not be responsible.
That's what I know for sure. The rest is up to the reader to decide. It's like a puzzle, and time is constantly in flux. The salesman may spot a seagull spying on him from above while walking the town streets, when suddenly he's a child looking at a gull outside his old bedroom window. We never really know what he is feeling throughout the novel, only what he's seeing and experiencing, or remembering. But there's no real meaning attached to his thoughts. That, again, is for the reader to determine, or invent.
Many of the events are told out of order. Sometimes we will witness the same scene multiple times, with multiple outcomes. Which is real, which is imagined? At about the 2/3 point, I pretty much stopped caring about figuring it all out and just (attempted to) enjoy the ride. What carried me through the novel, more so than the underlying mystery, was its eerie, almost David Lynchian atmosphere, as well as its unorthodox structure.
Robbe-Grillet's repetitive phrasing and relentless detailing of the protagonist's surroundings was rather hypnotic, which I liked, only "hypnotic" can easily turn into "sleep-inducing" when I'm reading late at night. The beguiling effect it had on me was similar to what little I've read of John Hawkes' and Anna Kavan's more surrealist works, but even more disorienting, imo.
Even though it didn't keep me entirely engaged, I've already got a couple more Robbe-Grillet novels lined-up, so it didn't leave me totally cold. Only bewildered. But in a good way, I think.
3.0 Stars.
That's what I know for sure. The rest is up to the reader to decide. It's like a puzzle, and time is constantly in flux. The salesman may spot a seagull spying on him from above while walking the town streets, when suddenly he's a child looking at a gull outside his old bedroom window. We never really know what he is feeling throughout the novel, only what he's seeing and experiencing, or remembering. But there's no real meaning attached to his thoughts. That, again, is for the reader to determine, or invent.
Many of the events are told out of order. Sometimes we will witness the same scene multiple times, with multiple outcomes. Which is real, which is imagined? At about the 2/3 point, I pretty much stopped caring about figuring it all out and just (attempted to) enjoy the ride. What carried me through the novel, more so than the underlying mystery, was its eerie, almost David Lynchian atmosphere, as well as its unorthodox structure.
Robbe-Grillet's repetitive phrasing and relentless detailing of the protagonist's surroundings was rather hypnotic, which I liked, only "hypnotic" can easily turn into "sleep-inducing" when I'm reading late at night. The beguiling effect it had on me was similar to what little I've read of John Hawkes' and Anna Kavan's more surrealist works, but even more disorienting, imo.
Even though it didn't keep me entirely engaged, I've already got a couple more Robbe-Grillet novels lined-up, so it didn't leave me totally cold. Only bewildered. But in a good way, I think.
3.0 Stars.
June 24, 2025
Big fan of the Nouveau Roman, and in particular Robbe-Grillet. This being my sixth novel.
Despite having no plot, told in a disinterested style where Robbe-Grillet couldn't care less for the psychological insights or emotions of anyone involved, and that leaves more questions than answers when it comes to the death of a thirteen-year old girl - accident or murder? - was there a voyeur? - a witness?, I can't say it's up there with my faves as for me it didn't feel Nouveau Roman enough. I love it when he is heavy on details. Things like rooms, furniture, windows, trees, leaves, roads, even pudddles. Even to extent of a scene being described right down to the distance between one object and another, or the height of a chair. I very much like the idea of a scene being frozen in its tracks; Robbe-Grillet pushing the pause button to observe, before we move on again. That's not to say he isn't heavy on details here. But I do like it when he goes to the extremes.
This is not a detective murder mystery, and anyone wanting one of those will likely go on to be bitterly disappointed and probably hate it.
June 28, 2013
It was as if no one had heard.
The whistle blew again-a shrill, prolonged noise followed by three short blasts of ear-splitting violence: a violence without purpose that remained without effect.
This is the beginning of Robbe-Grillet's, The Voyuer. What are we to make of it? Continous, obstinate, simple declarative observations of concrete objects. Is this the vision of a pursuer, pursued, a keen detective, the cultured pen of a writer who threatens the accumulation of metaphoric meaning? The tension approaches unbearable.
The narrator is absent. In this opened space we slip into the story. We do not see the character Mathias on a three hour boat trip back to the island of his youth, or the large eyed little girl reminding him of Violet. We do not see as him. We are him. We see the objects. The shards. The collectibles. Their weight, the burden of loneliness accumulating on our shoulders, massing, unrelenting. We have to be wary of exact but false memories which would substitute themselves for the original earth and stones.
We are here to sell watches. Right? As a rat in a skinner Box we press a bar to make a pellet of food appear even if not hungry. We must quadrant and parcel our time before arriving down to a minute, a second, to maximize the most efficiency. We sell watches. We sell time.
Robbe-Grillet makes it difficult for us. We just need to sell the watches and get back to the return boat before it leaves in the late afternoon. This is important, for us to return. Also to locate our past, the possibility of undoing in time what has been done? Healing? He shifts us in time from the past to the present and back. Their is the disappearance of transitions, of Robbe-Grillet himself. In his invisibility he has from a sentence to another using a third person lens, focusing his camera, as he did as a filmmaker, to view us close, then distant, making our alienation more profound. This whimsical God tosses us through time and space at His unseen will. See if that stands up in court. A thirteen year old girl has been murdered on the island. The sailor who reports it was not there.
People who we have grown up with do not recognize us, sometimes we, not them. It is difficult to follow conversations, to make ourselves understood. Time has passed. We change according to how we have lived it?
We can still sell more watches. We have not done well. Time has gotten away from us. Like reading a good book. We see the thirteen year old girl, Jacqueline, in the hollow where she can be pushed from the precipitous cliff into the sea. We see or imagine? The memory is not exact. It distorts, embellishes. She reminds us of Violet, Violet of her. There are pieces our memory will link. Narratives must be constructed. Robbe- Grillet knows that. Where is he? Our whimsical God hiding in his craft and invisibility. The more guilty we feel the more important it is for us to not appear guilty, which of course makes us look guiltier. We must catch the boat. What has happened to our time? Our world of isolated objects, noted? People who would open their doors and remember? Only if there was a narrator, an author for us to discuss this with, to consult.
We are left watching the boat disappear. We have missed it. Yet we are not disturbed. There is no one to go home to.
The whistle blew again-a shrill, prolonged noise followed by three short blasts of ear-splitting violence: a violence without purpose that remained without effect.
This is the beginning of Robbe-Grillet's, The Voyuer. What are we to make of it? Continous, obstinate, simple declarative observations of concrete objects. Is this the vision of a pursuer, pursued, a keen detective, the cultured pen of a writer who threatens the accumulation of metaphoric meaning? The tension approaches unbearable.
The narrator is absent. In this opened space we slip into the story. We do not see the character Mathias on a three hour boat trip back to the island of his youth, or the large eyed little girl reminding him of Violet. We do not see as him. We are him. We see the objects. The shards. The collectibles. Their weight, the burden of loneliness accumulating on our shoulders, massing, unrelenting. We have to be wary of exact but false memories which would substitute themselves for the original earth and stones.
We are here to sell watches. Right? As a rat in a skinner Box we press a bar to make a pellet of food appear even if not hungry. We must quadrant and parcel our time before arriving down to a minute, a second, to maximize the most efficiency. We sell watches. We sell time.
Robbe-Grillet makes it difficult for us. We just need to sell the watches and get back to the return boat before it leaves in the late afternoon. This is important, for us to return. Also to locate our past, the possibility of undoing in time what has been done? Healing? He shifts us in time from the past to the present and back. Their is the disappearance of transitions, of Robbe-Grillet himself. In his invisibility he has from a sentence to another using a third person lens, focusing his camera, as he did as a filmmaker, to view us close, then distant, making our alienation more profound. This whimsical God tosses us through time and space at His unseen will. See if that stands up in court. A thirteen year old girl has been murdered on the island. The sailor who reports it was not there.
People who we have grown up with do not recognize us, sometimes we, not them. It is difficult to follow conversations, to make ourselves understood. Time has passed. We change according to how we have lived it?
We can still sell more watches. We have not done well. Time has gotten away from us. Like reading a good book. We see the thirteen year old girl, Jacqueline, in the hollow where she can be pushed from the precipitous cliff into the sea. We see or imagine? The memory is not exact. It distorts, embellishes. She reminds us of Violet, Violet of her. There are pieces our memory will link. Narratives must be constructed. Robbe- Grillet knows that. Where is he? Our whimsical God hiding in his craft and invisibility. The more guilty we feel the more important it is for us to not appear guilty, which of course makes us look guiltier. We must catch the boat. What has happened to our time? Our world of isolated objects, noted? People who would open their doors and remember? Only if there was a narrator, an author for us to discuss this with, to consult.
We are left watching the boat disappear. We have missed it. Yet we are not disturbed. There is no one to go home to.
March 29, 2020
A deceptive book. First the title, then the cover and blurbs on the back lead you to think it's a mystery, that it contains a plot, or even meaningful characters. The back cover claims it is an expression of literature as art. But nouveau roman is a vague category. It can take many forms. I was reminded of Beckett, who's work, in my mind, ranged from atrocious to miraculously good. Robbe-Grillet's purpose in this novel seemed to be to experiment with detail, not to entertain, enlighten, or innovate. Hyper-attention to detail is fine in small doses. Yet, this becomes a catalogue of things normally subtracted from a good book.
If you're interested in this book (I can't think of any reason to read it unless you plan to live more than one lifetime) skip the first 110 pages. Or, better yet, skip to the last 20 pages. Nothing of consequence could be said to happen for 99% of the book, which is the reason for my rating. The main character wanders around a small island town not selling watches. The dialogue is mostly of the sales pitch variety. Having done sales myself, I didn't need to read about someone doing it. Especially with such lack of skill, clearly pre-judging his customers, and failing so miserably. But add to this a stifling, rococo hoard of environmental details - he spends pages describing chair legs, frilly curtains, rug patterns, carpet stains, gleaming windowpanes, puddles of mud on the side of the road, clouds in the shape of turds, and hundreds of other silly observations. With existential horror, I found myself reading it, being bored, and questioning my own sanity.
If you're interested in this book (I can't think of any reason to read it unless you plan to live more than one lifetime) skip the first 110 pages. Or, better yet, skip to the last 20 pages. Nothing of consequence could be said to happen for 99% of the book, which is the reason for my rating. The main character wanders around a small island town not selling watches. The dialogue is mostly of the sales pitch variety. Having done sales myself, I didn't need to read about someone doing it. Especially with such lack of skill, clearly pre-judging his customers, and failing so miserably. But add to this a stifling, rococo hoard of environmental details - he spends pages describing chair legs, frilly curtains, rug patterns, carpet stains, gleaming windowpanes, puddles of mud on the side of the road, clouds in the shape of turds, and hundreds of other silly observations. With existential horror, I found myself reading it, being bored, and questioning my own sanity.
November 6, 2020
A slog. With a mere 25 pages to go, I lost patience and couldn't finish it. There's a redundancy of detail that, I know, Robbe-Grillet thinks is his clever structural trick, but here, in translation, unlike in the exquisite Jealousy, is simply tedious. Read Jealousy instead.
April 7, 2011
Different mediums handle styles of narrative with more success than others. I think that Robbe-Grillet's style is one such example. I loved the film Last Year at Marienbad, which he wrote the screenplay for. The repetitiveness, the continual focus on the details of the hotel, the surreal dreamlike quality worked perfectly. A lot of the same stylistic themes are present in The Voyeur but they make me yawn here. I think some of why it works in the film is that the film is visually captivating, if the same stylistic themes were done by some grungy NYU film students with a hand-held camera and just kept going back to repetitive street scenes around St. Marks Place and the Cube the effect would be ruined. Rather than being a beautiful and interesting piece of art it would be boring pretentious shit that they would be lucky if they could get their closest friends to rent from Kim's Video.
That's sort of what I think of this book, kind of boring and pretentious shit that is saved by some moments of really good writing but which ultimately fails to make me either a) care about the novel, b) care to spend anytime wondering 'what it is all about' or c) want to even spend much time bashing. In a way this book is the most perfect three star book on my shelves, is so blaaahhhhhhhhh, so mediocre and inoffensive , so blaaahhhhhhhhhhh.
If I were a Seinfeld like comedian I might make a routine out of making fun of this whole French New Novel thing (I'm not going to even give it the benefit of making it sound more important by using the French words). I'd say something like, "What's the deal with this New Novel? What's New about it? Beckett did it. Kafka did it. Joyce did it. Woolf did it. Faulkner did it. Let's just say that Modernism did it, so what's so new in the 1960's about doing it again? What's up with that?" ----oh, but we are decentralizing the narrative by taking away the focus from the subject and putting it on the objects, oui? it is so boring to write about subjects, it is how do you say bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, and we are children of the 60's. Oh, shut the fuck up. This is as revolutionary as the Beats, which is only revolutionary if you've lived your life up until the time the stuff was produced reading nothing but the most drab mainstream shit, lived in a dark closest and had your head shoved so far up your ass that there was no chance of your eyes ever chancing to fall on any Literature. It was reading about the New Novel (I had to find out exactly what was new about it, apparently not much) that made me realize once again how terminally retarded (not as in having down syndrome but as in not progressing) so much of the 1960's was.
And if I were the comedian I mentioned above I might also say this, "What's up with all the going back and repeating what you said earlier? Is there a point? I don't see a point, are you being paid by the word? What's up with that? I mean if you are going to destroy linear narrative in a book destroy linear narrative, but don't be a half-assed schmuck about it, what's up with that?" And I point back to my initial comment that this same feature worked great in the film Robbe-Grillet wrote, but in a novel it felt like half-baked silliness.
That's sort of what I think of this book, kind of boring and pretentious shit that is saved by some moments of really good writing but which ultimately fails to make me either a) care about the novel, b) care to spend anytime wondering 'what it is all about' or c) want to even spend much time bashing. In a way this book is the most perfect three star book on my shelves, is so blaaahhhhhhhhh, so mediocre and inoffensive , so blaaahhhhhhhhhhh.
If I were a Seinfeld like comedian I might make a routine out of making fun of this whole French New Novel thing (I'm not going to even give it the benefit of making it sound more important by using the French words). I'd say something like, "What's the deal with this New Novel? What's New about it? Beckett did it. Kafka did it. Joyce did it. Woolf did it. Faulkner did it. Let's just say that Modernism did it, so what's so new in the 1960's about doing it again? What's up with that?" ----oh, but we are decentralizing the narrative by taking away the focus from the subject and putting it on the objects, oui? it is so boring to write about subjects, it is how do you say bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, and we are children of the 60's. Oh, shut the fuck up. This is as revolutionary as the Beats, which is only revolutionary if you've lived your life up until the time the stuff was produced reading nothing but the most drab mainstream shit, lived in a dark closest and had your head shoved so far up your ass that there was no chance of your eyes ever chancing to fall on any Literature. It was reading about the New Novel (I had to find out exactly what was new about it, apparently not much) that made me realize once again how terminally retarded (not as in having down syndrome but as in not progressing) so much of the 1960's was.
And if I were the comedian I mentioned above I might also say this, "What's up with all the going back and repeating what you said earlier? Is there a point? I don't see a point, are you being paid by the word? What's up with that? I mean if you are going to destroy linear narrative in a book destroy linear narrative, but don't be a half-assed schmuck about it, what's up with that?" And I point back to my initial comment that this same feature worked great in the film Robbe-Grillet wrote, but in a novel it felt like half-baked silliness.
August 3, 2010
A mesmerizing mystery/novel. By which I mean that the novel itself, and its fascinating construction, is as much the object of the mystery as the murder that seems to be contained within its pages. Here, unlike similarly subjective novels, Robbe-Grillet withholds any truly concrete narrative foundation as springboard to his stream-of-consciousness flights of fancy. There simply isn't any recognizable objective reality in the novel, as far as I an tell on first reading. We're constantly given seemingly objective details (exhaustively enumerated, measured, connected) but nearly all of these are completely undermined by contradictory intercuts, repetitions, flashbacks and flashforwards to incidents that have yet to occur within the story's timeline. (Flashforwards and intercuts are typically film terms, Robbe-Grillet was a director and screenwriter and his prose is extremely cinematic in its structure. Particularly, he is fond of going in for close-up on an object, then pulling back to reveal that the scene has entirely changed in time or place, which I'm sure has a film theory name that I don't knwo, but it's a great connecting technique here as there. Incidentally, Richard Howard's translation must be very good, because it retains this weird, cinematic disorientation very effectively.)
I recognize that this all sounds like it could be totally infuriating, but it isn't. Or rather, it wasn't to me. The sheer aesthetics are unique and terribly engaging. There is suspense, eerie eroticism, and a haunting sense of space and landscape. This last in particular, struck me.
An old Situationist essay (Ivan Chtcheglov's Formulary for a New Urbanism, published in France five years before The Voyeur, in 1953) commented on the architecture of Georgio de Chirico's paintings (which Robbe-Grillet's prose resmembles far more than de Chirico's own prose):
I can't help but feel like the absences of Robbe-Grillet's lonely locations and narrative continuity attain something similar.
I recognize that this all sounds like it could be totally infuriating, but it isn't. Or rather, it wasn't to me. The sheer aesthetics are unique and terribly engaging. There is suspense, eerie eroticism, and a haunting sense of space and landscape. This last in particular, struck me.
An old Situationist essay (Ivan Chtcheglov's Formulary for a New Urbanism, published in France five years before The Voyeur, in 1953) commented on the architecture of Georgio de Chirico's paintings (which Robbe-Grillet's prose resmembles far more than de Chirico's own prose):
Chirico remains one of the most remarkable architectural precursors. He was grappling with the problems of absences and presences in time and space.
We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. More precisely: although the quality of the impression generally remains indefinite, it nevertheless varies with the nature of the removed object and the importance accorded it by the visitor, ranging from serene joy to terror. (It is of no particular significance that in this specific case memory is the vehicle of these feelings; I only selected this example for its convenience.)
In Chirico’s paintings (during his Arcade period) an empty space creates a richly filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic future possibilities of such architecture and its influence on the masses. We can have nothing but contempt for a century that relegates such blueprints to its so-called museums.
I can't help but feel like the absences of Robbe-Grillet's lonely locations and narrative continuity attain something similar.
May 13, 2010
Beautifully and very very patiently written, The Voyeur reads like a dark fairy tale for adults (“all great novels are great fairy tales”—Nabokov).
The main character, Mathias, is a watch salesman, and his obsessive-compulsive fixation on the minutest details of stuff cripples his ability to sell anything. Mathias is always doing stuff like this (he’s at a bar, drinking an aperitif, trying to figure out the brand of the drink):
“Mathias wanted to reconstruct the scene in order to try to fasten on some fragment of bright-colored paper to compare with the labels lined up on the shelf.”
He then proceeds to examine at length whether or not the barmaid is left-handed, but alas “he could not establish a preliminary standard as to the respective functions of each hand. . . .”
Mathias!
Sometimes Robbe-Grillet reminded me of David Foster Wallace. First, both employ repetition as a way of parsing moments. (However, Robbe-Grillet’s repetition-use is more extreme, on some level, since he will repeat a description of a scene but use, say, three different words; or he’ll have a paragraph that covers the same ground but directly contradicts the paragraph before it, an antirepetition; or he’ll write the same paragraph in different tenses). Second, both writers are tricky. They both like dropping enticing little details in the midst of a blizzard of description. Sometimes, you won’t realize a given detail is relevant until 50 pages later, then you’ll have to scramble back to find where you first read it. Third, they can both be willfully discursive (but who isn’t these days; it's like the eighteenth century all over again).
The suspense in the book is intense and concerns stuff like When is Robbe-Grillet going to switch in a flash to the present tense again, When will the next slight alteration in narrative style occur, How many times is he going to repeat this particular hypnotic image. Concerning what happens plot-wise, there’s not much suspense since we all know Mathias killed the girl and didn’t kill the girl.
There are a lot of strange visionary paragraphs, for which it’s up to the reader to make of them what he/she will. I took them as Mathias’s deranged daydreams (a warped composite of the day’s circumstances overlaid with brutal desire), but that’s seemingly just one possibility. The visions have to do with bondage/violence/lust/anger, with a small compliant girl/woman (a recurring unknown Violet, who’s a Mathias-induced stand-in for the town’s universally lusted-after and loathed Jacqueline) submissively at the hands of a giant.
Here’s Robbe-Grillet describing two sailors late in the novel giving directions to Mathias so he can try to sell them watches:
“They began extremely lengthy explanations. . . . They probably gave him a bunch of useless and redundant details, but with such exactitude and insistence that Mathias was completely confused.”
Robbe-Grillet is a funny one.
The main character, Mathias, is a watch salesman, and his obsessive-compulsive fixation on the minutest details of stuff cripples his ability to sell anything. Mathias is always doing stuff like this (he’s at a bar, drinking an aperitif, trying to figure out the brand of the drink):
“Mathias wanted to reconstruct the scene in order to try to fasten on some fragment of bright-colored paper to compare with the labels lined up on the shelf.”
He then proceeds to examine at length whether or not the barmaid is left-handed, but alas “he could not establish a preliminary standard as to the respective functions of each hand. . . .”
Mathias!
Sometimes Robbe-Grillet reminded me of David Foster Wallace. First, both employ repetition as a way of parsing moments. (However, Robbe-Grillet’s repetition-use is more extreme, on some level, since he will repeat a description of a scene but use, say, three different words; or he’ll have a paragraph that covers the same ground but directly contradicts the paragraph before it, an antirepetition; or he’ll write the same paragraph in different tenses). Second, both writers are tricky. They both like dropping enticing little details in the midst of a blizzard of description. Sometimes, you won’t realize a given detail is relevant until 50 pages later, then you’ll have to scramble back to find where you first read it. Third, they can both be willfully discursive (but who isn’t these days; it's like the eighteenth century all over again).
The suspense in the book is intense and concerns stuff like When is Robbe-Grillet going to switch in a flash to the present tense again, When will the next slight alteration in narrative style occur, How many times is he going to repeat this particular hypnotic image. Concerning what happens plot-wise, there’s not much suspense since we all know Mathias killed the girl and didn’t kill the girl.
There are a lot of strange visionary paragraphs, for which it’s up to the reader to make of them what he/she will. I took them as Mathias’s deranged daydreams (a warped composite of the day’s circumstances overlaid with brutal desire), but that’s seemingly just one possibility. The visions have to do with bondage/violence/lust/anger, with a small compliant girl/woman (a recurring unknown Violet, who’s a Mathias-induced stand-in for the town’s universally lusted-after and loathed Jacqueline) submissively at the hands of a giant.
Here’s Robbe-Grillet describing two sailors late in the novel giving directions to Mathias so he can try to sell them watches:
“They began extremely lengthy explanations. . . . They probably gave him a bunch of useless and redundant details, but with such exactitude and insistence that Mathias was completely confused.”
Robbe-Grillet is a funny one.
May 7, 2024
A watch salesman returns to the island where he lived as a child, looking to make a few quick sales to old mates.
But, typically with Robbe-Grillet, things are not at all clearcut. Events have a habit of repeating themselves with slight variations. Objects are described in sometimes excruciating detail.
There's been a crime, or has there? Is the salesman incriminated?
But, typically with Robbe-Grillet, things are not at all clearcut. Events have a habit of repeating themselves with slight variations. Objects are described in sometimes excruciating detail.
There's been a crime, or has there? Is the salesman incriminated?
Read
March 9, 2025A Controlled Novel, Not Entirely Under Its Author's Control
-
Of Robbe-Grillet's four novels written in the 1950s—Les Gommes (1953), The Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957), and In the Labyrinth (1959)—this one is arguably the most difficult. The problems don't come from Robbe-Grillet's sudden "discontinuities" of time, place, or perspective, because those happen in the other books, and The Voyeur is not less "objective" (to use another of Roland Barthes's words) or affectless (to use a more current formulation). Rather there's a difficulty in deciding which effects and narrative forms are intentional, and which are intuitive, uncognized, or otherwise uncontrolled.
The Voyeur also differs from the other three novels in some ways that I don't think are problematic. For example, In the Labyrinth and Les Gommes have deliberately confusing and ambiguous city plans. It's clear from early on in both books that no sketch map will be possible. Jealousy is rigorously and consistently visualized, and a map is included. The Voyeur is the odd one out, because the island's roads can be mapped, but the shortcuts can't—but I don't think that poses a critical problem, other than the perhaps interesting psychological reasons for imagining that part of the The Voyeur's world can be mapped and part cannot.
Here are three sources of deeper difficulty, in no special order:
Ekphrases
The detailed descriptions of physical objects in Jealousy and In the Labyrinth are self-consistent, aside from the ambiguations between real and remembered scenes, and between actual life, painting, and print in In the Labyrinth). On the other hand, I find several descriptions in The Voyeur maddeningly opaque, and I'm not convinced that is intentional.
For example, the opening of The Voyeur includes several close descriptions of a pier. Crucial passages are, I think, illegible. When the book opens, a ferry is drawing near to a stone pier. The pier is higher than the ship, because it's low tide. There is a "landing slip" whose lower section is wet. I wonder if anyone has ever made sense of what follows:
"The stone rim--an oblique, sharp edge formed by two intersecting perpendicular planes: the vertical embankment perpendicular to the quay and the ramp leading to the top of the pier--was continued along its upper side at the top of the pier by a horizontal line extending straight toward the quay."
I haven't checked the French here, but surely "embankment" is a poor word choice: it's a vertical stone wall. And why does the slip have a "rim"? Why not an edge? And what about the other edge? I can understand "continued along its upper side at the top of the pier" but wouldn't it be clearer to say the pier extended out several meters, and then the slope of the landing slip began?
These sorts of stumbling-blocks are important because Robbe-Grillet is capable both of exact descriptions and deliberate ambiguations. I think the descriptions of the pier are neither: for me, their obscurities are inadvertent artifacts of the author's visual imagination, which tends toward simple geometric descriptions that do not always account what a reader might need in order to build a mental picture.
Later the narrator goes ashore, and we get this description of the main square:
"But the center of town was not situated behind the houses along the quay. It was a square, opening at its narrowest side on the quay itself and roughly triangular in shape. Besides the quay, which thus constituted the base of the triangle pointing into the town, four roadways opened into it..."
Is the triangular town square's wide base the quay, or is the quay its point ("narrowest side") so it widens in the direction away from the quay? Later the square is described as a trapezoid with an apex at the top of the square (where there is a city hall); and in another place we're told there is an "alley" that leads from the square to the quay.
It is tempting to read this descriptive haze as one of Robbe-Grillet's deliberate ambiguations, but I am not sure: I think it shows a geometric pathology of description—a form of visual attention that is solipsistic and unintentionally difficult for readers. An enactment, in other words, of a relatively absorbed, unaware state of mind that does not make room for a reader's needs. This is not the same as the deliberately confusing city plans and temporalities, or the accumulation of "useless details" given with "such exactitude and insistence" that we are "completely confused," as the narrator himself notes about two sailors' attempts to guide him. Those strategies are entirely intentional.
Structure of the book
With a novel as thoroughly read as this one, by a novelist as controlling and analytic as Robbe-Grillet, it may seem especially misguided to raise questions of structure. The Voyeur was meticulously planned in certain regards. The temporal jumps, for example, are often brilliant: unexplained and sudden changes in time and space are one of Robbe-Grillet's most effective inventions. So are recurrences of the figure-eight motif (I count five different kinds of things shaped like figure eights), and so is the timetable.
But when the narrator returns to the scene of the crime and confronts the boy who claims to have been watching him, the tone and structure of the book changes. That scene reads like part of someone else's book: time flows uninterrupted for several pages, and things get tense. Emotional heat is allowed into the book's mainly cold gray atmosphere, and the dramatic tension (including the narrator sweating for the first time) continues in the narrator's race to the pier.
Given that the murder may have taken place in the distant past (even as a local legend), the switch to a focalized account of the narrator's anxiety feels like a break in the author's own self-imposed structure of temporal and spatial dislocations. But is it? It's equally plausible that Robbe-Grillet wanted to call a halt to his dissociative narrative and plunge into a more conventional murder mystery—but if so, what overall structure accounts for the influx of normal time and emotion, which then dwindle again at the end?
Psychology
I have similar doubts about Robbe-Grillet's control of his character's psychology. In Les Gommes, Jealousy (1957), and In the Labyrinth, the main characters (detective, husband, soldier) have tightly constrained ranges of emotion and awareness, and they are consistent throughout each book.
Here, the narrator is sharply aware of his surroundings and able to remember everyone he meets, and yet entirely incapable of recalling where his childhood home was or who any of his friends or relatives were. In the course of the book he finds himself at home, but the fact is mentioned casually, indicating he's known it all along. Robbe-Grillet seems never to have worked out how to explain the narrator's amnesia and indifference (two separate things!), or to resolve how much anxiety he should feel (none, if he's not a murderer or a psychopath; a great deal, if he is destroying evidence in order not to be caught).
Conclusion
These are the sorts of things I mean by calling the book "difficult." It's not harder to negotiate the puzzles, dislocations, and ambiguities of The Voyeur than the other three novels of the 1950s. It's the questions of authorial control that make this book so resistant to a coherent reading.
A last note, on reception: it's not easy to read a book like this, which has been read by so many people over seven decades, with fresh eyes. It's often said, for example, that as you read you realize there's a gap of about an hour when the narrator's actions are not accounted for. But that is probably not any reader's experience. In fact, the narrator himself tells us as much and then worries about it. I have read several scholarly accounts of The Voyeur that focus on its epistemology and implicit philosophy (What kind of time does it present us? Who is the voyeur of the title?), but like any novel this is not a question on a philosophy exam. It's a complex object, often under the author's obsessive control and sometimes a fascinating mess. The other three novels of the 1950s are still directly pertinent as precedents for more recent fiction. This one is more stubbornly rooted in the changing states of mind of its author.
-
Of Robbe-Grillet's four novels written in the 1950s—Les Gommes (1953), The Voyeur (1955), Jealousy (1957), and In the Labyrinth (1959)—this one is arguably the most difficult. The problems don't come from Robbe-Grillet's sudden "discontinuities" of time, place, or perspective, because those happen in the other books, and The Voyeur is not less "objective" (to use another of Roland Barthes's words) or affectless (to use a more current formulation). Rather there's a difficulty in deciding which effects and narrative forms are intentional, and which are intuitive, uncognized, or otherwise uncontrolled.
The Voyeur also differs from the other three novels in some ways that I don't think are problematic. For example, In the Labyrinth and Les Gommes have deliberately confusing and ambiguous city plans. It's clear from early on in both books that no sketch map will be possible. Jealousy is rigorously and consistently visualized, and a map is included. The Voyeur is the odd one out, because the island's roads can be mapped, but the shortcuts can't—but I don't think that poses a critical problem, other than the perhaps interesting psychological reasons for imagining that part of the The Voyeur's world can be mapped and part cannot.
Here are three sources of deeper difficulty, in no special order:
Ekphrases
The detailed descriptions of physical objects in Jealousy and In the Labyrinth are self-consistent, aside from the ambiguations between real and remembered scenes, and between actual life, painting, and print in In the Labyrinth). On the other hand, I find several descriptions in The Voyeur maddeningly opaque, and I'm not convinced that is intentional.
For example, the opening of The Voyeur includes several close descriptions of a pier. Crucial passages are, I think, illegible. When the book opens, a ferry is drawing near to a stone pier. The pier is higher than the ship, because it's low tide. There is a "landing slip" whose lower section is wet. I wonder if anyone has ever made sense of what follows:
"The stone rim--an oblique, sharp edge formed by two intersecting perpendicular planes: the vertical embankment perpendicular to the quay and the ramp leading to the top of the pier--was continued along its upper side at the top of the pier by a horizontal line extending straight toward the quay."
I haven't checked the French here, but surely "embankment" is a poor word choice: it's a vertical stone wall. And why does the slip have a "rim"? Why not an edge? And what about the other edge? I can understand "continued along its upper side at the top of the pier" but wouldn't it be clearer to say the pier extended out several meters, and then the slope of the landing slip began?
These sorts of stumbling-blocks are important because Robbe-Grillet is capable both of exact descriptions and deliberate ambiguations. I think the descriptions of the pier are neither: for me, their obscurities are inadvertent artifacts of the author's visual imagination, which tends toward simple geometric descriptions that do not always account what a reader might need in order to build a mental picture.
Later the narrator goes ashore, and we get this description of the main square:
"But the center of town was not situated behind the houses along the quay. It was a square, opening at its narrowest side on the quay itself and roughly triangular in shape. Besides the quay, which thus constituted the base of the triangle pointing into the town, four roadways opened into it..."
Is the triangular town square's wide base the quay, or is the quay its point ("narrowest side") so it widens in the direction away from the quay? Later the square is described as a trapezoid with an apex at the top of the square (where there is a city hall); and in another place we're told there is an "alley" that leads from the square to the quay.
It is tempting to read this descriptive haze as one of Robbe-Grillet's deliberate ambiguations, but I am not sure: I think it shows a geometric pathology of description—a form of visual attention that is solipsistic and unintentionally difficult for readers. An enactment, in other words, of a relatively absorbed, unaware state of mind that does not make room for a reader's needs. This is not the same as the deliberately confusing city plans and temporalities, or the accumulation of "useless details" given with "such exactitude and insistence" that we are "completely confused," as the narrator himself notes about two sailors' attempts to guide him. Those strategies are entirely intentional.
Structure of the book
With a novel as thoroughly read as this one, by a novelist as controlling and analytic as Robbe-Grillet, it may seem especially misguided to raise questions of structure. The Voyeur was meticulously planned in certain regards. The temporal jumps, for example, are often brilliant: unexplained and sudden changes in time and space are one of Robbe-Grillet's most effective inventions. So are recurrences of the figure-eight motif (I count five different kinds of things shaped like figure eights), and so is the timetable.
But when the narrator returns to the scene of the crime and confronts the boy who claims to have been watching him, the tone and structure of the book changes. That scene reads like part of someone else's book: time flows uninterrupted for several pages, and things get tense. Emotional heat is allowed into the book's mainly cold gray atmosphere, and the dramatic tension (including the narrator sweating for the first time) continues in the narrator's race to the pier.
Given that the murder may have taken place in the distant past (even as a local legend), the switch to a focalized account of the narrator's anxiety feels like a break in the author's own self-imposed structure of temporal and spatial dislocations. But is it? It's equally plausible that Robbe-Grillet wanted to call a halt to his dissociative narrative and plunge into a more conventional murder mystery—but if so, what overall structure accounts for the influx of normal time and emotion, which then dwindle again at the end?
Psychology
I have similar doubts about Robbe-Grillet's control of his character's psychology. In Les Gommes, Jealousy (1957), and In the Labyrinth, the main characters (detective, husband, soldier) have tightly constrained ranges of emotion and awareness, and they are consistent throughout each book.
Here, the narrator is sharply aware of his surroundings and able to remember everyone he meets, and yet entirely incapable of recalling where his childhood home was or who any of his friends or relatives were. In the course of the book he finds himself at home, but the fact is mentioned casually, indicating he's known it all along. Robbe-Grillet seems never to have worked out how to explain the narrator's amnesia and indifference (two separate things!), or to resolve how much anxiety he should feel (none, if he's not a murderer or a psychopath; a great deal, if he is destroying evidence in order not to be caught).
Conclusion
These are the sorts of things I mean by calling the book "difficult." It's not harder to negotiate the puzzles, dislocations, and ambiguities of The Voyeur than the other three novels of the 1950s. It's the questions of authorial control that make this book so resistant to a coherent reading.
A last note, on reception: it's not easy to read a book like this, which has been read by so many people over seven decades, with fresh eyes. It's often said, for example, that as you read you realize there's a gap of about an hour when the narrator's actions are not accounted for. But that is probably not any reader's experience. In fact, the narrator himself tells us as much and then worries about it. I have read several scholarly accounts of The Voyeur that focus on its epistemology and implicit philosophy (What kind of time does it present us? Who is the voyeur of the title?), but like any novel this is not a question on a philosophy exam. It's a complex object, often under the author's obsessive control and sometimes a fascinating mess. The other three novels of the 1950s are still directly pertinent as precedents for more recent fiction. This one is more stubbornly rooted in the changing states of mind of its author.
June 26, 2023
Line of grey water. Iron rings submerge in waves. Series of lines, connecting, network of curves, angles. Shortcut to the cottages, all the same, one-story, single window. Only four miles long. Keep to schedule. Knock on wooden door, knock again with ring. Enter, first door on the right. New oilcloth on table. Press the clasps. Open the suitcase, remove the cardboard strips. Waterproof, shockproof.
Figure eight of cord, greasy. String collection, the cupboard not locked, empty. Chromium-plated bicycle. Ride into yellow light. Sun glints on fenders. Chain noisy, chain quiet, fix the chain, fix the chain, the chain is fine. How much time. How to account, the memorandum book, the suitcase, lay book in the cover. Figure eight around island. Series of lines. Half-smoked cigarettes. The parapet, a timorous face. Violet, Violet...little Jacqueline...grey sweater, just a rag.
Close-fitting black dress. Delicate skin. Nape of neck exposed, tip of a vertebra, thin black cloth, wrists behind back, kneeling. Remove the cardboard strips. Face of watch. The time, the time...it spreads, retracts. Path along the fields. Grey gull perched on a post. All afternoon, drawing. A single window. Draw it all day. Light only reaches so far. The table below the window. Beyond the light, into the corners, the shadows, come forward. Four panes of window. Finger to her mouth. Spider crabs. Laughing. The steamer, the sheep disturbed. Too close to the edge.
Iron rings, submerge, waves cover rust marks. Another glass of absinthe. Gumdrops. The suitcase, angles, copper rivets. Press the clasps. Remove the protective paper, the cardboard strips. Close the loop of an eight.
Figure eight of cord, greasy. String collection, the cupboard not locked, empty. Chromium-plated bicycle. Ride into yellow light. Sun glints on fenders. Chain noisy, chain quiet, fix the chain, fix the chain, the chain is fine. How much time. How to account, the memorandum book, the suitcase, lay book in the cover. Figure eight around island. Series of lines. Half-smoked cigarettes. The parapet, a timorous face. Violet, Violet...little Jacqueline...grey sweater, just a rag.
Close-fitting black dress. Delicate skin. Nape of neck exposed, tip of a vertebra, thin black cloth, wrists behind back, kneeling. Remove the cardboard strips. Face of watch. The time, the time...it spreads, retracts. Path along the fields. Grey gull perched on a post. All afternoon, drawing. A single window. Draw it all day. Light only reaches so far. The table below the window. Beyond the light, into the corners, the shadows, come forward. Four panes of window. Finger to her mouth. Spider crabs. Laughing. The steamer, the sheep disturbed. Too close to the edge.
Iron rings, submerge, waves cover rust marks. Another glass of absinthe. Gumdrops. The suitcase, angles, copper rivets. Press the clasps. Remove the protective paper, the cardboard strips. Close the loop of an eight.
October 21, 2025
if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com
240608: there is conceptual difficulty in these years, in fascination, depiction, of that particular surrealist interest in little girls. in this case no more than the young naked body 'the salesman' seems to have raped/killed? whose characterisation by islanders certainly veers towards blaming the victim. she is basically muted. we never hear her story. there is in fact no 'story'. there are images and images dislocated in time and space, in memory and repetition, as we inhabit the disturbed obsessive mind of Mathias. this again, is what i love about r-g. this is probably the third time read. i had the first time read felt this was appealing to my most perverse desires while revelling in art of his writing. having now read many books by and on him, i am able to separate when necessary form and content. there is no separation. form is content. perhaps not for critical women readers, not for some feminists, but i find it rewarding reread...
i am always learning from my reading for my writing. this reminds me of the years in my twenties when i first read r-g. tried then to apply his 'style' to my sff short stories but these were opaque if not incoherent. but my desire to incorporate this way of writing persists, however it might fail. here in rereading i learn again: subtle time shifts, tense shifts, resemble typical/atypical film cuts, advancing the story, questioning the story, imagining the story he is trying so hard to create as alibi for... whom? i like this as much but in different way than Jealousy & In the Labyrinth...
231015: it has been years since i last read r-g much but this definitely confirms why r-g is one of my favourite authors. images, images, images. implicit story, characterisation, theme, perversion, violence. haunting. disturbing. fascinating. clear, geometric, dispassionate observations very similar to Jealousy & In the Labyrinth where the unseen, the repressed, the forgotten is key to following gradually explicit horror. I would agree it ends suspended because the final images seem ambiguous then not least imaginary, described the way images collide, proliferate, cut, from one to the other, and his sense of time of life and time of dream or fantasy is tenuous at best (and he is watch salesman...?)...
more:
by-
The Erasers
Last Year at Marienbad
Voyeur
La Maison de rendez-vous
Project for a Revolution in New York
La Belle Captive
Topology of a Phantom City
Recollections of the Golden Triangle
The Immortal One
Djinn
Repetition
A Regicide
Djinn
Repetition
A Sentimental Novel
francaise-
La Jalousie
Dans le labyrinthe
Les Gommes
L'année dernière à Marienbad
Instantanés
on-
For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
Generative Literature and Generative Art: New Essays
Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Body of the Text
The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films
Inventing The Real World: The Art of Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet
240608: there is conceptual difficulty in these years, in fascination, depiction, of that particular surrealist interest in little girls. in this case no more than the young naked body 'the salesman' seems to have raped/killed? whose characterisation by islanders certainly veers towards blaming the victim. she is basically muted. we never hear her story. there is in fact no 'story'. there are images and images dislocated in time and space, in memory and repetition, as we inhabit the disturbed obsessive mind of Mathias. this again, is what i love about r-g. this is probably the third time read. i had the first time read felt this was appealing to my most perverse desires while revelling in art of his writing. having now read many books by and on him, i am able to separate when necessary form and content. there is no separation. form is content. perhaps not for critical women readers, not for some feminists, but i find it rewarding reread...
i am always learning from my reading for my writing. this reminds me of the years in my twenties when i first read r-g. tried then to apply his 'style' to my sff short stories but these were opaque if not incoherent. but my desire to incorporate this way of writing persists, however it might fail. here in rereading i learn again: subtle time shifts, tense shifts, resemble typical/atypical film cuts, advancing the story, questioning the story, imagining the story he is trying so hard to create as alibi for... whom? i like this as much but in different way than Jealousy & In the Labyrinth...
231015: it has been years since i last read r-g much but this definitely confirms why r-g is one of my favourite authors. images, images, images. implicit story, characterisation, theme, perversion, violence. haunting. disturbing. fascinating. clear, geometric, dispassionate observations very similar to Jealousy & In the Labyrinth where the unseen, the repressed, the forgotten is key to following gradually explicit horror. I would agree it ends suspended because the final images seem ambiguous then not least imaginary, described the way images collide, proliferate, cut, from one to the other, and his sense of time of life and time of dream or fantasy is tenuous at best (and he is watch salesman...?)...
more:
by-
The Erasers
Last Year at Marienbad
Voyeur
La Maison de rendez-vous
Project for a Revolution in New York
La Belle Captive
Topology of a Phantom City
Recollections of the Golden Triangle
The Immortal One
Djinn
Repetition
A Regicide
Djinn
Repetition
A Sentimental Novel
francaise-
La Jalousie
Dans le labyrinthe
Les Gommes
L'année dernière à Marienbad
Instantanés
on-
For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
Generative Literature and Generative Art: New Essays
Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Body of the Text
The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films
Inventing The Real World: The Art of Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet
June 22, 2009
it took a while for me to get into this but once i did, it was stunning. incredibly geometric, cinematic but all chopped up. fucking genius.
October 5, 2023
This was, at least, the fourth or fifth book I’ve read by AR-G. Despite appreciating the obvious craft and technique the man controlled, I’ve yet to ever come across one I actually gave a fuck about. His is a clicking Insect Literature: all mandibles and pincers, but no goddam blood in it. I want blood! Just once, smear some crimson on my page, let the head of the still-ensconced and upright Ant Queen spurt its life goo wherever it may. No, not on my face.
Or my hair!
Or my hair!
August 16, 2007
So creepy...
October 5, 2017
4.75/5 - Exquisite
January 9, 2023
For reasons that make no sense, Mathias, a travelling watch salesman, returned to the island of his birth, for one day, to sell watches. Two three hours crossings was a great loss of time for such a small island, and neither friendships nor any early memories attracted him to the place. His sales plan was awful: sell 89 watches in 6h & 15min. That is, arrival, sales talk, display of watches, choice of watch, payment, and departure had to be completed every 4min. He did not take into account any hesitation that people may have, further explanations he may have to give, discussion about pricing or the time needed to get from one door to another. Shops, houses, hallways and kitchens led to failure after failure.
Everything from that day was recounted by Mathias in great detail. But very soon gaps and inconsistencies accumulate. Mathias’ memories are not reliable: “the room he entered was not at all remarkable – except for an unmade bed with a red spread trailing on the floor. There was no red bedspread, nor was there an unmade bed; no lambskin, no night table, no bed lamp; there was no blue pack of cigarettes, no painting on the wall. The room he had been directed to was only a kitchen, where he put his suitcase flat on the big oval table in the middle.” Things get more confusing because, a young girl – Jacqueline, or was it Violette? - was found dead. The clues, if there’re any, are in the details. Mathias’s memories and thoughts are terribly distorted tho. What had he been doing since morning? The whole extent of time seems too long, too uncertain, too unaccounted for. And the more confusing his memories are the more suspect he seems. Mathias keeps on playing back his day, carried away by the flood of his own words. From sentence to sentence, the ground beneath his feet gives way a little more. To secure his narrative, he repeats himself, but he can’t quite get the details to match. His concern for exactitude is the very thing that accuses him. I think. By the end of the novel, Mathias’ reality lost all meaning and as reader you can never be quite sure what the underlying facts were.
This novel is disturbing & confusing (on purpose). But, it is well executed.
Everything from that day was recounted by Mathias in great detail. But very soon gaps and inconsistencies accumulate. Mathias’ memories are not reliable: “the room he entered was not at all remarkable – except for an unmade bed with a red spread trailing on the floor. There was no red bedspread, nor was there an unmade bed; no lambskin, no night table, no bed lamp; there was no blue pack of cigarettes, no painting on the wall. The room he had been directed to was only a kitchen, where he put his suitcase flat on the big oval table in the middle.” Things get more confusing because, a young girl – Jacqueline, or was it Violette? - was found dead. The clues, if there’re any, are in the details. Mathias’s memories and thoughts are terribly distorted tho. What had he been doing since morning? The whole extent of time seems too long, too uncertain, too unaccounted for. And the more confusing his memories are the more suspect he seems. Mathias keeps on playing back his day, carried away by the flood of his own words. From sentence to sentence, the ground beneath his feet gives way a little more. To secure his narrative, he repeats himself, but he can’t quite get the details to match. His concern for exactitude is the very thing that accuses him. I think. By the end of the novel, Mathias’ reality lost all meaning and as reader you can never be quite sure what the underlying facts were.
This novel is disturbing & confusing (on purpose). But, it is well executed.
April 7, 2020
This was the second book I read by this author after the very well written Jealousy, and I would say that I like this one about as much. A watch seller decides to take a ferry across to a little island off the mainland, desperate to sell his collection in the space of that day, as he really needs the money. Once he gets to the island, he hires a bike to get around so he can attempt to sell some watches and this is where everything slowly unravels for him. Without giving anything away, its the sense of paranoia and uncertainty throughout this book that gives it that brilliant, unsettling feeling, aided by the weird time shifts, which leave you unsure exactly of the order of things. It reminded me a lot of Kafka in some ways, as when you read The Trial, there is always that same sense of impending doom and a deeply ominous atmosphere and you get that with this book, with the same precision writing that Robbe-Grillet achieved with Jealousy. Its very much a slow, patient kind of read, again like Jealousy, but all the odd little details and the not-quite-right meetings he has with various islanders during his eventful day out, build to a really memorable and confounding reading experience, which leaves you a little shaken and sticks in your mind a while afterwards...
I would suggest that both this book and Jealously are best read if you feel like a slow, all-about-the-details sort of read, and they aren't the type of thing you blast through in a day, but rather savour the obvious care and attention the author has put into them.
October 4, 2023
One of the strangest books ever wriiten, this could be a sinister mystery of a girl's disappearnce on a holiday island, or it could be the ramblings of a bored vacationer.
In the movie "Sideways" the character played by Paul Giamatti is telling his would-be girlfriend on their first date about the novel he's currently writing; he explains that he started the novel going one direction, then turned it into "a sort of Robbe-Grillet mystery, you know?" -- to which the girl he's speaking to vacantly nods her head "O.K." That's what reading this book is like -- vacantly nodding your head, as if you understand it, but you don't really.
In the movie "Sideways" the character played by Paul Giamatti is telling his would-be girlfriend on their first date about the novel he's currently writing; he explains that he started the novel going one direction, then turned it into "a sort of Robbe-Grillet mystery, you know?" -- to which the girl he's speaking to vacantly nods her head "O.K." That's what reading this book is like -- vacantly nodding your head, as if you understand it, but you don't really.
November 26, 2011
The Voyeur fits very well the "anti novel" bill; a book that eschews any psychological insight/motivation but leaves one inferring what happens and why while using a very clear and compelling language to present the narrative.
If you feel like doing a crossword puzzle or playing a computer game but reading is your passion, try this book and you will get the feel of the above while reading a master of contemporary literature.
Do not expect things to be simple, make sense or offer too much of a resolution, just enjoy the flow and the author's superb style and his sense of place and logic
If you feel like doing a crossword puzzle or playing a computer game but reading is your passion, try this book and you will get the feel of the above while reading a master of contemporary literature.
Do not expect things to be simple, make sense or offer too much of a resolution, just enjoy the flow and the author's superb style and his sense of place and logic
September 18, 2023
This was such a gripping, suspenseful book. The premise is very simple: a salesman visits a small island of which he was once a resident, hoping to sell his stock of wristwatches. After that, everything is up for grabs, including the central turn of the plot: the murder of a young girl. The suspense builds slowly, but don’t run out of patience. This is a meta-thriller, where you begin to doubt whether there’s even such a thing as “narrative” at all.
February 3, 2017
I cannot read this hypnotic book enough times. Imagine being inside the mind of Peter Lorre's character in M, only through multiple ambiguous shots. Did the timid watch salesman brutally kill the girl? Inside his head you can feel the disassociation and increasing feeling of contained hysteria. And who is the voyeur?
June 8, 2021
I don’t read a lot of fiction; this was weird and wild and eerie enough to intrigue me. Like a Calvino or a Perec or Everett or who knows what.
August 24, 2022
Le Voyeur est un roman qui pourrait être décrit comme un orage de mémoire et de présages : des conversations et des scènes entières se répètent—ayant à chaque fois une fin différente—, l’histoire est racontée de manière non-chronologique et l’intrigue au centre du roman est presque inexistente.
Cependant, c’est un roman qui est merveilleusement écrit. Bien que le narrateur soit externe, il adopte tous les processus psychologiques du personnage principal et il incarne sa vue. Son odyssée par une île (dont on ne connaît jamais le nom ni la location) est soigneusement dépeinte, permettant au lecteur de connaître tous les coins et corridors étroits du bourg et de la côte. Le roman donne au lecteur un sentiment constant d’être en train de rêver le rêve d’autrui, avec des personnages dont on ne connaît que des détails superficiels.
Cependant, c’est un roman qui est merveilleusement écrit. Bien que le narrateur soit externe, il adopte tous les processus psychologiques du personnage principal et il incarne sa vue. Son odyssée par une île (dont on ne connaît jamais le nom ni la location) est soigneusement dépeinte, permettant au lecteur de connaître tous les coins et corridors étroits du bourg et de la côte. Le roman donne au lecteur un sentiment constant d’être en train de rêver le rêve d’autrui, avec des personnages dont on ne connaît que des détails superficiels.
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February 23, 2015What was it that happened in France in the mid-20th Century? Why did all of these writers suddenly start writing these eerie, abstract things that, while rooted in descriptions of such everyday shit, kind of just roll around? Did it have anything to do with the fact that their countrymen, people like Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, were making filmic equivalents?
Whatever the answer, The Voyeur is a perfect example of one of these weird French things, written by the primary theorist of the nouveau roman. Utterly baffling, utterly stunning, and if you think that all those characteristics of the novel that your 8thgrade English teacher pointed out deserve some rethinking, you'll dig it.
Whatever the answer, The Voyeur is a perfect example of one of these weird French things, written by the primary theorist of the nouveau roman. Utterly baffling, utterly stunning, and if you think that all those characteristics of the novel that your 8thgrade English teacher pointed out deserve some rethinking, you'll dig it.
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May 21, 2017Yes, this is good.
May 15, 2021
Mathias is a salesman of watches who goes to the island where he grew up, to sell watches over the course of one day. He has an overly ambitious schedule for selling the watches, but even though he goes about the island, on a chromium-plated rented cycle, he achieves little. A very wild girl (is she Violet? Is she Jacqueline?) vanishes and is found dead, washed up by the sea. There are sea gulls. There are spider crabs. And various mysterious women who say little (or little in comparison to the napes of their necks, which speak volumes). There are bits of blue paper here and there. Houses with two windows on either side of a door. An odd teenager who seems to suspect Mathias of murdering-whoever-that-girl-was.
I started off The Voyeur with high hopes: this was listed in a list of 100 Novels to Read (yes, well; I’m gullible, I guess). What’s more, its blurb indicated that it was a murder mystery.
Murder mystery, my whatever. A murder mystery needs to be resolved to qualify for that epithet. Mathias seems to go about doing some investigating of his own (just as well, since nobody else seems to do anything except gossip about the female). But nothing comes of it, not even any sense. Instead, there’s reams of repetition and near-repetition (and you don’t get prizes for guessing how this paragraph was different from that one, though they both read pretty much the same). There are long, lingering descriptions of utterly boring, inconsequential things like piers and tables, parallel lines and windows. There are odd little diversions when you wonder if Mathias murdered the girl, or raped another girl, or is only fondly imagining that he did those, or either of those.
By the end of it, I didn’t give a damn.
Ah, well. At least now I know Alain Robbe-Grillet isn’t my cup of tea.
I started off The Voyeur with high hopes: this was listed in a list of 100 Novels to Read (yes, well; I’m gullible, I guess). What’s more, its blurb indicated that it was a murder mystery.
Murder mystery, my whatever. A murder mystery needs to be resolved to qualify for that epithet. Mathias seems to go about doing some investigating of his own (just as well, since nobody else seems to do anything except gossip about the female). But nothing comes of it, not even any sense. Instead, there’s reams of repetition and near-repetition (and you don’t get prizes for guessing how this paragraph was different from that one, though they both read pretty much the same). There are long, lingering descriptions of utterly boring, inconsequential things like piers and tables, parallel lines and windows. There are odd little diversions when you wonder if Mathias murdered the girl, or raped another girl, or is only fondly imagining that he did those, or either of those.
By the end of it, I didn’t give a damn.
Ah, well. At least now I know Alain Robbe-Grillet isn’t my cup of tea.
April 28, 2016
I read this for a class in French Cinema and Literature. While I was reading it to study for the mid-term we had, I found that reading this book was actually fun. Not only did the author do a great job at keeping you feeling disoriented, and slightly confused at everything, but at the end, when you take a step back, you're not sure if you even read the book, or it was all in your head. At least that's what I experienced. The book does such a good job of keeping you just as disoriented as the protagonist, you come out of reading it, and you are haunted by it.
I still think about it occasionally. While I finished the book thinking I knew all the answers, the style in which it was written, and how the author presented all the information, keeps me wondering. Did he do it, or is it all in his head?
I still think about it occasionally. While I finished the book thinking I knew all the answers, the style in which it was written, and how the author presented all the information, keeps me wondering. Did he do it, or is it all in his head?
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