Word: clothbound
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...SQUARE, by Marguerite Duras (118 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; papperback, $1.45). A nursemaid meets a man in a village square; they talk, while the child plays, of how it is possible to go on living. The man travels about selling five-and-dime notions from a suitcase. He is able to live, he says, because he is without hope; his life will not change, and he does not mind. The girl, on the other hand, endures a dreary job because she lives in hope of finding a husband. Life is bleak for each of them; he lives from meal...
JEALOUSY, by Alain Robbe-Grillet (149 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.75). The author admires cinema techniques, and his book would make an excellent art-house movie. But like his earlier work, The Voyeur (TIME, Oct. 13, 1958), it is also thoroughly irritating. A prosaic love triangle is established on a remote banana plantation-a planter (the book's nameless narrator), his wife and a neighboring plantation owner. If this were one of Paul Bowles's African novels of sin and sun, the weather would cloud up on cue, providing a timpani accompaniment to the heroine...
DOCTOR SAX (245 pp.)-Jack Kerouac -Grove Press (clothbound, $3.50; paperback...
...VOYEUR, by Alain Robbe-Grillet (219 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.75), is based on the author's notion that "the world is neither significant nor absurd. It is. That is the most remarkable thing about it." Proceeding from this Istentialist view, Author Robbe-Grillet, hero of Europe's avant-garde critics, has written a sort of whodunit in which the question of whodunit is never answered. To a French offshore island comes Mathias, a watch salesman. Little is told about him, but it is soon plain that he is close to insanity and that his special aberration...
...UNNAMABLE, by Samuel Beckett (179 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.45), carries the blob hero to his logical conclusion: "complete disintegration." Mahood, the hero-victim of The Unnamable, who early in the book dubs himself Worm, never leaves a large jar. It stands on a pedestal in a street presumably in Paris, just outside a chophouse. He is without arms and legs, and a collar fastened to the lip of the jar fits under his jaw so that he cannot move his head. The restaurant owner's wife changes the sawdust in the jar now and then, feeds...