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A Regicide
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.
- GenresFictionFranceLiterature
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
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About the author
Alain Robbe-Grillet
102 books432 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 2, 2017
‘A Regicide’ is Robbe-Grillet’s long unpublished first novel. The novel follows two characters on an anonymous island-one is an unnamed character whose poetic musings imbue his narrative with a dream-like quality and the other is Boris, a statistician in a factory who one day for no real reason decides to murder the king.
Like most of Robbe-Grillet’s novels, the hypnotic prose style, in which even the most quotidian details are explored in granular detail, via the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator, so that a cloud of uncertainty hovers over the reader, raining down a series of beautiful and increasingly strange images;
“The clouds block the sky in violet bars, parallel to the horizon; nevertheless the air is dryer and lighter than usual, the faraway distance is lit with the slightly misleading clarity that one sees just before the rain.”
The whole novel is shrouded in uncertainty as the reader struggles to separate reality from fiction-with Boris’s passages increasingly reading like the mental meanderings of a madman, a man fixated with the murder of a monarch for whom he harbours a vague ambivalence and who he may (or may not) have murdered-shifting perspectives and the illusory nature of memory, reality and the narrative form are common themes in Robbe-Grillet;
“Looking closer he noticed that the camera seemed to be pointed, not at the bridge-although it was the subject of the photograph as the caption confirmed-but at the paving stones in the foreground; while everything else was unclear, the paving stones formed the quayside roadway at the bottom of the picture detached themselves with extraordinary clarity and seemed, so luminous were they, to be wet with rain, although the weather was absolutely fine.”
It may be worth touching on Robbe-Grillet’s unique prose and descriptive style-almost like a mechanical Proust, whose descriptions of light resemble Proust sans his rambling prose style. Robbe-Grillet is able to capture the quiddity of things-from the proliferation of insects to dawn on the shore-line;
“With dawn the shore could be seen again, large and flat, where the receding tide had left visible tufts of bladderwrack exposed; lower down the brown tresses were bathed in an undertow of discoloured water with the the slow rocking that follows love. A light odour of iodine floated in the wind”
Little is ever explained-instead much is lift to the reader to interpret as they see fit-which is made doubly difficult by the unreliability of the main narrator, Boris, whose mind is slowly descending into madness.
Like most of Robbe-Grillet’s novels, the hypnotic prose style, in which even the most quotidian details are explored in granular detail, via the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator, so that a cloud of uncertainty hovers over the reader, raining down a series of beautiful and increasingly strange images;
“The clouds block the sky in violet bars, parallel to the horizon; nevertheless the air is dryer and lighter than usual, the faraway distance is lit with the slightly misleading clarity that one sees just before the rain.”
The whole novel is shrouded in uncertainty as the reader struggles to separate reality from fiction-with Boris’s passages increasingly reading like the mental meanderings of a madman, a man fixated with the murder of a monarch for whom he harbours a vague ambivalence and who he may (or may not) have murdered-shifting perspectives and the illusory nature of memory, reality and the narrative form are common themes in Robbe-Grillet;
“Looking closer he noticed that the camera seemed to be pointed, not at the bridge-although it was the subject of the photograph as the caption confirmed-but at the paving stones in the foreground; while everything else was unclear, the paving stones formed the quayside roadway at the bottom of the picture detached themselves with extraordinary clarity and seemed, so luminous were they, to be wet with rain, although the weather was absolutely fine.”
It may be worth touching on Robbe-Grillet’s unique prose and descriptive style-almost like a mechanical Proust, whose descriptions of light resemble Proust sans his rambling prose style. Robbe-Grillet is able to capture the quiddity of things-from the proliferation of insects to dawn on the shore-line;
“With dawn the shore could be seen again, large and flat, where the receding tide had left visible tufts of bladderwrack exposed; lower down the brown tresses were bathed in an undertow of discoloured water with the the slow rocking that follows love. A light odour of iodine floated in the wind”
Little is ever explained-instead much is lift to the reader to interpret as they see fit-which is made doubly difficult by the unreliability of the main narrator, Boris, whose mind is slowly descending into madness.
January 4, 2024
260419: first read in french. read in english...
070517: writing from 1949, rejected, revived 1978. if you read r-g you will see original style of writing more unusual/usual obsessions than in poetics. read this 30 months ago, so... maybe i misremember, but mainly read it avant-garde, abstract, dark, existential etc. of the era and v few concessions to usual boring mainstream lit... this is fun. for me...
more:
by-
Jealousy & In the Labyrinth
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
Djinn
Repetition
A Regicide
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
070517: writing from 1949, rejected, revived 1978. if you read r-g you will see original style of writing more unusual/usual obsessions than in poetics. read this 30 months ago, so... maybe i misremember, but mainly read it avant-garde, abstract, dark, existential etc. of the era and v few concessions to usual boring mainstream lit... this is fun. for me...
more:
by-
Jealousy & In the Labyrinth
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
Djinn
Repetition
A Regicide
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
maybe
August 11, 2015A Regicide by Alain Robbe-Grillet review – debut novel in English for the first time: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015...
MB A Regicide
4* The Erasers
July 3, 2023
What an odd book. (And I say that with a good amount of affection.)
Un Régicide was Robbe-Grillet’s debut novel, but it took a few decades to see publication, largely because of how strange it is.
Boris, the protagonist, decides to assassinate the king after l’Eglise (the Church Party) takes over the country. It’s not some drawn out political thriller, where the plotter has been devising an idea using his wiles, stewing away for years on end. Instead, it’s quite random, given Boris’ background. Yet the most interesting part – and perhaps the most Robbe-Grillet part – is that it’s not clear what’s truly unfolding and what’s happening in Boris’ mind. It makes for a bit of an uneasy, winding read.
At the same time, the novel goes on a whole separate journey with Boris, where he’s living on a remote island. The two don’t really appear to have much (if anything) in common, and it casts the main regicide plot in even greater doubt, making Boris’ reality increasingly unclear.
I did prefer the author’s La Jalousie, which I read many years ago. But I really liked seeing the machinations of Robbe-Grillet’s rather unpredictable but still well-executed style here, too.
Un Régicide was Robbe-Grillet’s debut novel, but it took a few decades to see publication, largely because of how strange it is.
Boris, the protagonist, decides to assassinate the king after l’Eglise (the Church Party) takes over the country. It’s not some drawn out political thriller, where the plotter has been devising an idea using his wiles, stewing away for years on end. Instead, it’s quite random, given Boris’ background. Yet the most interesting part – and perhaps the most Robbe-Grillet part – is that it’s not clear what’s truly unfolding and what’s happening in Boris’ mind. It makes for a bit of an uneasy, winding read.
At the same time, the novel goes on a whole separate journey with Boris, where he’s living on a remote island. The two don’t really appear to have much (if anything) in common, and it casts the main regicide plot in even greater doubt, making Boris’ reality increasingly unclear.
I did prefer the author’s La Jalousie, which I read many years ago. But I really liked seeing the machinations of Robbe-Grillet’s rather unpredictable but still well-executed style here, too.
May 11, 2021
2.5/5
Het verhaal over Boris die een koningsmoord probeert te plegen is goed, zeer goed zelfs, maar het wordt voortdurend onderbroken door veel minder interessante gebeurtenissen in een "andere wereld" (het hoofd van Boris?) op een agrarisch eiland waar het voortdurend mist. Krampachtig speciaal proberen doen.
Het verhaal over Boris die een koningsmoord probeert te plegen is goed, zeer goed zelfs, maar het wordt voortdurend onderbroken door veel minder interessante gebeurtenissen in een "andere wereld" (het hoofd van Boris?) op een agrarisch eiland waar het voortdurend mist. Krampachtig speciaal proberen doen.
November 26, 2019
it was very fine. it was fun to read at times but honestly i lost interest in both plots after about halfway through.
January 6, 2026
This book is a strange brain fog.
August 27, 2015
An ‘experimental’ novel that I understand was written in 1949 although not published until 1978 and only this year has it been translated for the first time into English, so it already comes with a history. I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say it concerns the assassination of the king (the clue is in the title) but does it? A lot of what happens in this book might only take place inside the protagonist’s mind. Maybe he is a factory worker who lives in a politically stagnant land where the ‘Church Party’ has swept to power and where their successful use of propaganda has convinced the apathetic populace of the passive masses to enthusiastically embrace the ‘immense task of recovery’ needed for them all…or perhaps he lives on a remote mist-shrouded island that has known neither invasion nor conquest, where he is one of the few inhabitants of the tiny fishing village who scratch out a meagre existence...
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews