Word: voyeurism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
PRIX MEDICIS. The head of this prize committee was Novelist Alain (The Voyeur) Robbe-Grillet, and the winner was one of Robbe-Grillet's disciples in the school of "New Realism" (TIME, Oct. 13), which stresses objects and description rather than people and motivation. Winner Claude Ollier's La Mise En Scéne offered "interminable descriptions that spare you nothing and then, without ever seeming to take sides, crush you under the weight of inhuman detail." A mining engineer's efforts to make sense out of the remote mountains of North Africa, to lint his murdered...
...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...
...Voyeur is a savage but pointless reaction against the psychological novel. Instead of probing the mind, the book nearly ignores it, and concentrates on the exact description of things. In accordance with Author Robbe-Grillet's belief that objects are more important than people. The island, a barroom, a bedroom, are etched into the reader's mind, while the story itself and the characters are allowed to go hang. Sooner or later, Robbe-Grillet or one of his disciples is bound to write a novel about a roomful of furniture; the affair between the armchair and the ottoman...