Understanding Alain Robbe-Grillet

the long version

"In this introduction to the French writer, Roch C. Smith suggests that despite the initial shock often felt on a first encounter with Robbe-Grillet, reading his work can be great fun for someone willing to tolerate defamiliarization and ambiguity and to become an interactive traveler through his narrative mazes. With this exploration of Robbe-Grillet's novels, short stories, and autobiographies, Smith offers a guide for the adventuresome reader to the writer's labyrinthine and playful world.". "Transforming bewilderment into understanding and pleasure while preserving a sense of Robbe-Grillet's considerable richness and complexity, Smith elucidates the defining elements of the writer's fictional world - characters that barely exist, changeable narrators, plots that defy logic, notoriously meticulous descriptions that never quite form a complete story. Smith examines Robbe-Grillet's embrace of discontinuity, circularity, indeterminacy, and linguistic play. Smith also poses questions about how we should view this perplexing writer: as an author of hyperobjective novels and short stories, a subjective novelist, a realist, or a writer who undermines the narrative's claim to represent reality. In addition Smith evaluates the sado-erotic imagery of Robbe-Grillet's middle and late novels as a metaphorical play with textual and social conventions."--BOOK JACKET.