Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008)

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 show more 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. show less

This avant-gardist "new novel" from 1965 hovers somewhere between a prose poem and an extended film treatment for an impressionistic thriller. The narrative continuity is distorted in every possible way, with flashbacks, flashforwards, conjectures coalescing as accounts, descriptions dissolving into perspectives, and frames imposed and broken in many other ways. There are plays performed at parties, and a passage that begins by describing action on stage may move seamlessly into an apparent show more real-world setting, or vice versa. Similar liberties are taken with a group of sculptures on the grounds of the Blue Villa (the Maison of the title), and with conversations of various sorts.

The first-person narrator is far from omniscient, offering numerous contradictions, and sometimes pausing to question details in the story being told. It is not even clear whether the Blue Villa is truly in Hong Kong, or whether it is merely a place where reminiscences and/or fantasies about Hong Kong find a home. There is a short list of characters who are multiplied by the effects of perspective, as demonstrated in their repeatedly-transformed names: Ava, Eva, Eve; Johnson, Johnston, Jonestone; Loraine, Lauren, and so on.

To the extent that a plot makes itself detectable, it involves human trafficking, the narcotics trade, Cold War espionage, elite society intrigue, murder, and even cannibalism. But the focus is on recurring motifs told with conspicuously similar details, such as travels by taxi, a girl walking a dog, a transaction over a desk, menace from the authorities, a magazine advertisement, a woman lying on her side and propped on one elbow. At points, the story re-enters a familiar groove and contents itself with an "etc." or even "etc. etc."

There are no chapter divisions, and the story "resolves" only in the manner of a musical composition, by returning to the chord which is thus revealed to be its tonic. Avowedly a fiction, it avoids showing the reader enough consistency or narrative authority to determine an "objective" course of events in the surfeit of description. Instead, the dreamlike associations of the text invite the reader to share in the manicured fantasy where the author wanders. show less

Obra prima sem tamanho, compulsivamente o li em poucas horas, pois a capacidade do Robbe-Grillet repetir as mesmas cenas destrinchando a linguagem de formas diferentes é particularmente brilhante, especialmente porque reflete no tipo de pensamento obsessivo causado pelo ciúme, mesmo que se isente de qualquer tipo de análise psicológica no sentido clássico da acepção e sim aniquilando o tempo. Não é uma leitura difícil ou chata como vemos muitos dizendo por aí, mas sim melhor show more degustada por aqueles aptos a assumirem seu amor pela grandiosidade e diversidade da linguagem. show less

“I am certain that a novelist is someone who attributes a different reality-value to the characters and events of his story than to those of 'real' life. A novelist is someone who confuses his own life with that of his characters.”
― Alain Robbe-Grillet

The Erasers is one of the most convoluted, complex, knotty novels a reader could possibly encounter, a novel that can be approached from multiple perspectives and on multiple levels, everything from an intricate detective mystery to a show more meditation on the circularity of time, from the phenomenology of perception to the story of Oedipus, to name several.

For the purpose of this review, I will focus on one aspect of The Erasers I have not come across in any of the commentary I’ve read by scholars, literary critics or book reviewers – the prevalence of ugliness in the city where the novel is set.

With its winding streets and system of canals, the novel’s city has been likened to Amsterdam, but any likeness to this beautiful, charming Dutch city ends there. The cold Northern European industrial city we encounter in The Erasers is ugly and creepy, lacking any trace of charm or warmth.

The main character, special agent Wallas, who travels to the city to solve a murder, repeatedly reflects on this lack of aesthetic attraction and beauty, as when we read: “a city completely barren of appeal for an art lover," and then again, “a huge stone building ornamented with scrolls and scallops, fortunately few in number – in short, of rather somber ugliness.” From Wallas’s multiple observations, this unnamed city’s stark ugliness can bring to my mind Golconda by the surrealist René Magritte, a painting of a cityscape raining men in black suits and bowlers, painted in the same year as the publication of The Erasers.



This unattractiveness also extends to the people inhabiting the city. Two men described in some detail are both fat and flabby and move in a stiff and mechanical way: first, the manager of the café, portrayed as follows: “A fat man is standing here, the manager . . . greenish, his features blurred, liverish, and fleshy in his aquarium.” Second, Laurent, the chief commissioner: “He is a short, plump man with a pink face and a bald skull . . . his overfed body shakes from fits of laughter.”

Tom, one of the condemned prisoners, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s story The Wall is such a flabby, fat man. Also, Antoine Roquentin, the main character in Sartre’s novel Nausea, describes the shaking hands of another fat man: “Then there was his hand like a fat white worm in my own hand. I dropped it almost immediately and the arm fell back flabbily.”

So, why am I highlighting these facts? Because I have the strong impression both Robbe-Grillet and Sartre (a great influence on the author) saw flab and fat as repulsive and ugly, a counter to the possibility of freedom and spontaneity and fluidity we can experience in our human embodiment.

In contradistinction, Wallas is a tall, calm young man with regular features and who walks with an elastic, confident gate. But at every turn Wallas encounters ugliness, even in an automat where there is a sign reading: “Please Hurry. Thank you.” And this sign is repeated many times on the white walls of the automat. How nauseating! Not surprisingly, Wallas eats too fast, resulting in an upset stomach. Shortly thereafter he returns to a familiar dirty café and he continues to feel ill.

Here are few more direct quotes on what Wallas sees in this city:
• “Mouth open, the man is staring into space, one elbow on the table propping up his bloated head.”
• “Once again, Wallas is walking toward the bridge. Ahead of him, under a snowy sky, extends the Rue de Brabant – and its grim housefronts.”
• “From another angle, the man assumes an almost coarse expression that has something vulgar, self-satisfied, rather repugnant about it.”

True, Wallas encounters one saleswoman who is upbeat and slightly provocative, but the other people he encounters, to the extent these men and woman are described, are drab and shabby and decidedly unattractive.

An entire city of unsightly sights and repellent people. Is it too much of a stretch to interpret the pistol Wallas shoots at the end of the novel as, in part, a reaction to overbearing ugliness? Perhaps in the same way the pistol shots in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (a work Alain Robbe-Grillet counts as one of his prime influences) are a reaction to the searing heat and glare from the sun and the young Arab’s knife blade?

Rather than providing a definitive answer, this raises another set of questions: Are we as readers so coarse and dull and deadened by the modern mechanized world that we accept the ugly as the norm? Does this acceptance account for the fact that all the essays and reviews I have read on this novel do not draw attention to the ugliness Wallas confronts? show less