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The Erasers
Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is then turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin.
Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.
Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.
256 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1953
About the author
Alain Robbe-Grillet
90 books406 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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April 5, 2024
The Erasers is a mystery but it is nowhere near any hardboiled detective stories.
The structure of The Erasers is a structure of labyrinth – the characters constantly roam the labyrinths of streets and they incessantly rove in the labyrinths of their thoughts…
Incertitude and uncertainty – the characters keep roaming the labyrinths of the crime versions until they get lost in the maze.
That is our consciousness and this is our world. We are sure that we know everything about the world we live in but we’re just wandering the labyrinths of our own misconceptions…
The structure of The Erasers is a structure of labyrinth – the characters constantly roam the labyrinths of streets and they incessantly rove in the labyrinths of their thoughts…
Usually this landscape has little relief and looks rather unattractive, but this morning the grayish yellow sky of snowy days gives it unaccustomed dimensions. Certain outlines are emphasized, others are blurred; here and there distances open out, unsuspected masses appear; the whole view is organized into a series of planes silhouetted against one another, so that the depth, suddenly illuminated, seems to lose its natural look—and perhaps its reality—as if this over-exactitude were possible only in a painting. Distances are so affected that they become virtually unrecognizable, without it being possible to say in just what way they are transformed: extended or telescoped—or both at once—unless they have acquired a new quality that has more to do with geometry… Sometimes this happens to lost cities, petrified by some cataclysm for centuries—or only for a few seconds before their collapse, a wink of hesitation between life and what already bears another name: after, before, eternity.
Incertitude and uncertainty – the characters keep roaming the labyrinths of the crime versions until they get lost in the maze.
In the murky water of the aquarium, furtive shadows pass—an undulation whose vague existence dissolves of its own accord… and afterward it is questionable whether there had been anything to begin with. But the dark patch reappears and makes two or three circles in broad daylight, soon coming back to melt, behind a curtain of algae, deep in the protoplasmic depths. A last eddy, quickly dying away, makes the mass tremble for a second. Again everything is calm… Until, suddenly, a new form emerges and presses its dream face against the glass…
That is our consciousness and this is our world. We are sure that we know everything about the world we live in but we’re just wandering the labyrinths of our own misconceptions…
April 13, 2024
“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 meditation on the circularity of time, from the phenomenology of perception to the story of Oedipus.
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?
October 30, 2024
THE ERASING OF VALUE!
Don’t be misled by this book’s sombre unfolding of mysteries. The mysteries are not the point.
The truth of this book, as my reading of Kierkegaard forces me to say, is its REMORSE. For the grim and endless battles of WWII had recently collapsed, in Robbe-Grillet’s Europe, into peace: a dystopian debacle of utter hopelessness.
I finished this book in March of 1972, during the beginning of the final spring thaw. I still remember walking through the puddled, misty, grey streets of our sleepy Ontario university town, musing deeply.
For its streets, like the U2 song says, now seemed to be nameless - and endless - for that was part and parcel of the greyly monotonous magic spell that Alain Robbe-Grillet had by then woven into the fabric of my mind!
A “pathetic fallacy” indeed on the part of my dozing imagination...
It was, after Beckett, my first encounter with postmodernism. And I enjoyed it; for as only one year now remained till graduation, I needed every escape I could find from my heavy course load.
But there is grave danger in certain escapes!
And Robbe-Grillet’s road does indeed wind forever into nowhere... with plenty of sharp, alarming revelations appearing suddenly into the field of vision of the protagonist - a Sûreté cop - only to disappear in even deeper folds of mist. Such in fact is our life!
Where are we going? What do we know for sure?
So Robbe-Grillet, hunkered down at his writing desk in the shambles that was postwar Europe, seems to ask...
Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano was 8 years old in 1953 - the year Les Gommes was published. But he seems to have been unaware of the power of the nouveau roman until he was 17, when one of the writers of that genre, Raymond Queneau, took him under his wing.
Robbe-Grillet was by then the genre’s leading theorist. And his influence on this soon-to-be cause-célèbre youth is unmistakeable. So Modiano’s novel Missing Person must have had its nascence in his attentive reading of The Erasers!
So The Erasers was utterly groundbreaking in its time.
A lot of us are moving in endless grey foggy spaces, like Robbe-Grillet’s inspector, especially in these unsettling days.
Why’s that?
Well, think back to as late as the early twentieth century.
It was a world of plain facts.
You could be sure that the sun would always shine again, that weather patterns wouldn’t act in a schizoid manner, that tomorrow would be much the same as today.
You even see that still in the 1970’s in the drab grey French provincial towns patrolled by the drab Inspector Maigret’s clones. The predictable is comforting, and even murder can appear mundane under such comforting predictability.
But wasn’t it Mauriac who said of Georges Simenon’s perennial sameness that it can horribly expose “the depths of this nightmare that (he) paints with such unendurable art”? And the nightmare lives on and grabs us in Robbe-Grillet.
Now that’s all changed, because our postmodernism, like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, rides the Pale Horse of Brute Nothingness.
We are assaulted by the Absurd at every turn.
Instead of facts we have become an appalled world, hyper-conscious of its Breaking Tweets.
Is there hope in that?
There will be, if we put our endless wanderings through rootlessness to good use.
But that day may have to wait, until that day when we can finally
Redeem the Time. Redeem the Dream.
The token of the word unheard
Unspoken...
Peace of mind may be closer than we think, if we learn to return to ourselves and our Original Vision of things -
Unconstrained by the dismal prison of our dour everyday “factual” refusal to dream.
For it is in our dreams that we recover our life!
Don’t be misled by this book’s sombre unfolding of mysteries. The mysteries are not the point.
The truth of this book, as my reading of Kierkegaard forces me to say, is its REMORSE. For the grim and endless battles of WWII had recently collapsed, in Robbe-Grillet’s Europe, into peace: a dystopian debacle of utter hopelessness.
I finished this book in March of 1972, during the beginning of the final spring thaw. I still remember walking through the puddled, misty, grey streets of our sleepy Ontario university town, musing deeply.
For its streets, like the U2 song says, now seemed to be nameless - and endless - for that was part and parcel of the greyly monotonous magic spell that Alain Robbe-Grillet had by then woven into the fabric of my mind!
A “pathetic fallacy” indeed on the part of my dozing imagination...
It was, after Beckett, my first encounter with postmodernism. And I enjoyed it; for as only one year now remained till graduation, I needed every escape I could find from my heavy course load.
But there is grave danger in certain escapes!
And Robbe-Grillet’s road does indeed wind forever into nowhere... with plenty of sharp, alarming revelations appearing suddenly into the field of vision of the protagonist - a Sûreté cop - only to disappear in even deeper folds of mist. Such in fact is our life!
Where are we going? What do we know for sure?
So Robbe-Grillet, hunkered down at his writing desk in the shambles that was postwar Europe, seems to ask...
Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano was 8 years old in 1953 - the year Les Gommes was published. But he seems to have been unaware of the power of the nouveau roman until he was 17, when one of the writers of that genre, Raymond Queneau, took him under his wing.
Robbe-Grillet was by then the genre’s leading theorist. And his influence on this soon-to-be cause-célèbre youth is unmistakeable. So Modiano’s novel Missing Person must have had its nascence in his attentive reading of The Erasers!
So The Erasers was utterly groundbreaking in its time.
A lot of us are moving in endless grey foggy spaces, like Robbe-Grillet’s inspector, especially in these unsettling days.
Why’s that?
Well, think back to as late as the early twentieth century.
It was a world of plain facts.
You could be sure that the sun would always shine again, that weather patterns wouldn’t act in a schizoid manner, that tomorrow would be much the same as today.
You even see that still in the 1970’s in the drab grey French provincial towns patrolled by the drab Inspector Maigret’s clones. The predictable is comforting, and even murder can appear mundane under such comforting predictability.
But wasn’t it Mauriac who said of Georges Simenon’s perennial sameness that it can horribly expose “the depths of this nightmare that (he) paints with such unendurable art”? And the nightmare lives on and grabs us in Robbe-Grillet.
Now that’s all changed, because our postmodernism, like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, rides the Pale Horse of Brute Nothingness.
We are assaulted by the Absurd at every turn.
Instead of facts we have become an appalled world, hyper-conscious of its Breaking Tweets.
Is there hope in that?
There will be, if we put our endless wanderings through rootlessness to good use.
But that day may have to wait, until that day when we can finally
Redeem the Time. Redeem the Dream.
The token of the word unheard
Unspoken...
Peace of mind may be closer than we think, if we learn to return to ourselves and our Original Vision of things -
Unconstrained by the dismal prison of our dour everyday “factual” refusal to dream.
For it is in our dreams that we recover our life!
July 2, 2017
Notes: Twenty-four hours in 256 pages: 5.6 pages per hour. Over description for purposes of derealisation or defamiliarization, a technique out of Russian Formalism. Much movement of characters through physical space—the streets of an unnamed provincial city beset by canals and drawbridges, a derelict inn, etc.—focusing on externals. Even interior monologues focus on the external world. Virtually no introspection into the individual lives of the characters: their preferences or peccadilloes. Even for the victim, Professor Daniel Dupont, most detail given is about how to achieve his murder. There's little curiosity about his work, which never gets more specific than "political work," though two texts are mentioned, one on economic cycles and another on phenomenology. There is also a mention of anarchists. The novel has elements of the police procedural; it might also be called, in part, a murderers' procedural. Published in 1953, some of its more obvious models would probably have been Georges Simenon, Agatha Christie, Boris Vian etc. Reminds me in some ways, too, of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Probably because of the anarchists, though in that earlier novel (1907) they tend to promote terror by bombing things. The mode of terror here is death by gunshot. The diction is moderately freighted. This is no light, airy read by any means. Moreover, it is utterly humorless. The book must contain twenty points of view, each with its own unique perspective on events rigorously thought out. Streets of the unnamed town are labyrinthine. Wallas, the newbie detective, is often lost. A shrewdly thought out work that grips the reader consistently. The post-modernist bits don't get in the way. Mostly, a very dense thriller requiring close reading. An unusual, rewarding read.
October 29, 2020
Les Gommes = The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman and one of the great novelists of the 20th century.
The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy.
The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin. Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوم ماه مارس سال 2003میلادی
عنوان: پاک کن ها؛ نویسنده: آلن رب گری یه؛ مترجم: پرویز شهدی؛ مشخصات نشر تهران، نشر دشتستان؛ 1379، در 336ص، شابک: 9649285210؛ موضوع: داستانهای فرانسوی - سده 20م
چاپ دیگر همین عنوان: تهران، نسل آفتاب، 1389، در 344ص، شابک 9786005847291؛
آلن، این رمان خویش را، در سال 1951میلادی بنگاشته است؛ «رب گری یه» از چهره های جنبش ادبی و هنری رمان نو، یا موج نو، بودند، که در دهه س 1960میلادی، هیاهوی بسیاری به پا کردند؛ «رب گری یه» از نظر اندیشه به فلاسفه ی «آلمانی»، به ویژه به «هایدگر» و سبک داستان پردازی «کافکا»، گرایش داشتند، و دیدگاه ایشان، با تفاوت قائل شدن، میان واقعیت و رئال، به این معنی که درک رئالیستی واقعیت، نمیتواند تمامی آن را بیان کند، بسیار نزدیک به جریان فلسفی «پست مدرنیسم» میشد، که در همان زمان، در «فرانسه» پا بگرفته بود؛ «رولان بارت»، از برجسته ترین شارحان «پست ��درنیسم»، به ویژه در حوزه هنر و ادبیات، هماره به طرز اغراق آمیزی، داستانهای «آلن رب گری یه» را میستودند؛ «رب گری یه» از راویت «رئال دانای کل»، آن چنانکه در آثار «بالزاک» به چشم میآید، پرهیز میکردند، و با توصیف جزئیات، و خودداری از بکارگیری صفت، به «گوستاو فلوبر» نزدیک میشدند؛ روش ایشان، در بهره گیری از تلفیق رؤیا و واقعیت، و در هم ریختن خط طولی زمان، داستانهای «مارسل پروست» را به یاد خوانشگر میآورد
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 07/08/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman and one of the great novelists of the 20th century.
The Erasers, his first novel, reads like a detective story but is primarily concerned with weaving and then probing a complete mixture of fact and fantasy.
The narrative spans the twenty-four-hour period following a series of eight murders in eight days, presumably the work of a terrorist group. After the ninth murder, the investigation is turned over to a police agent, who may in fact be the assassin. Both an engrossing mystery and a sinister deconstruction of reality, The Erasers intrigues and unnerves with equal force as it pull us along to its ominous conclusion.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز دوم ماه مارس سال 2003میلادی
عنوان: پاک کن ها؛ نویسنده: آلن رب گری یه؛ مترجم: پرویز شهدی؛ مشخصات نشر تهران، نشر دشتستان؛ 1379، در 336ص، شابک: 9649285210؛ موضوع: داستانهای فرانسوی - سده 20م
چاپ دیگر همین عنوان: تهران، نسل آفتاب، 1389، در 344ص، شابک 9786005847291؛
آلن، این رمان خویش را، در سال 1951میلادی بنگاشته است؛ «رب گری یه» از چهره های جنبش ادبی و هنری رمان نو، یا موج نو، بودند، که در دهه س 1960میلادی، هیاهوی بسیاری به پا کردند؛ «رب گری یه» از نظر اندیشه به فلاسفه ی «آلمانی»، به ویژه به «هایدگر» و سبک داستان پردازی «کافکا»، گرایش داشتند، و دیدگاه ایشان، با تفاوت قائل شدن، میان واقعیت و رئال، به این معنی که درک رئالیستی واقعیت، نمیتواند تمامی آن را بیان کند، بسیار نزدیک به جریان فلسفی «پست مدرنیسم» میشد، که در همان زمان، در «فرانسه» پا بگرفته بود؛ «رولان بارت»، از برجسته ترین شارحان «پست ��درنیسم»، به ویژه در حوزه هنر و ادبیات، هماره به طرز اغراق آمیزی، داستانهای «آلن رب گری یه» را میستودند؛ «رب گری یه» از راویت «رئال دانای کل»، آن چنانکه در آثار «بالزاک» به چشم میآید، پرهیز میکردند، و با توصیف جزئیات، و خودداری از بکارگیری صفت، به «گوستاو فلوبر» نزدیک میشدند؛ روش ایشان، در بهره گیری از تلفیق رؤیا و واقعیت، و در هم ریختن خط طولی زمان، داستانهای «مارسل پروست» را به یاد خوانشگر میآورد
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 07/08/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
August 26, 2017
Nine murders in nine days, one by one, every evening at seven-thirty. Sounds like a typical plot for a lurid, pulpy thriller– instead, what you get is a mindbender of postmodern writing that turns conventional tropes of detective fiction upside down & becomes, at times, too smart for its own good.
Part thrilling, part annoying, the book explores a murder that
The same event is revisited several times, involving different characters, and reconstructing the crime scene from different angles. Using repetition, & mirroring devices, the text produces a disorienting effect & the numerous roads, canals, and bridges become a labyrinth in which the readers feel lost, much like the special agent investigating the crime.
The book boasts of high end literary influences like Sophocles, Borges, and Joyce. While the stylistic experiments are interesting, hardcore detective fiction fans; looking for a tightly-woven yarn, will be somewhat disappointed.
An awareness of Robbe-Grillets's theory of the New Novel, Por une Nouveau Roman (1963), would be helpful in appreciating this innovative work of fiction and so would a viewing of his cinematic masterpiece, Last Year at Marienbad. Chances are, if you loved that movie, you would be better prepared to tackle this book.
Here's an excerpt from Robbe-Grillet's Paris Review interview which is a kind of good explanation of this book :
INTERVIEWER
I would like to discuss certain recurrent themes in your work. For example, there are similarities between your books and detective novels. Is that a deliberate choice?
ROBBE-GRILLET
Do you know Borges’s preface to Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel? In it, Borges maintains that all the great novels of the twentieth century are detective novels, and he mentions Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Kafka’s The Castle, and many others. Then he explains why. It seems that the structure of police investigation is very close to the technique of modern novels, in particular the non-resolved investigation, as in The Castle. The difference is that in the traditional detective novel there must be a solution, whereas in ours there is just the principle of investigation. Detective novels are consumer products, sold by millions, and are made in the following way: there are clues to an event, say a murder, and someone comes along and puts the the pieces together in order that truth may be revealed. Then it all makes sense. In our novels what is missing is “sense.” There is a constant appeal to sense, but it remains unfulfilled, because the pieces keep moving and shifting and when “sense” appears it is transitory. Therefore, what is important is not to discover the truth at the end of the investigation, but the process itself.
Part thrilling, part annoying, the book explores a murder that
The same event is revisited several times, involving different characters, and reconstructing the crime scene from different angles. Using repetition, & mirroring devices, the text produces a disorienting effect & the numerous roads, canals, and bridges become a labyrinth in which the readers feel lost, much like the special agent investigating the crime.
The book boasts of high end literary influences like Sophocles, Borges, and Joyce. While the stylistic experiments are interesting, hardcore detective fiction fans; looking for a tightly-woven yarn, will be somewhat disappointed.
An awareness of Robbe-Grillets's theory of the New Novel, Por une Nouveau Roman (1963), would be helpful in appreciating this innovative work of fiction and so would a viewing of his cinematic masterpiece, Last Year at Marienbad. Chances are, if you loved that movie, you would be better prepared to tackle this book.
Here's an excerpt from Robbe-Grillet's Paris Review interview which is a kind of good explanation of this book :
INTERVIEWER
I would like to discuss certain recurrent themes in your work. For example, there are similarities between your books and detective novels. Is that a deliberate choice?
ROBBE-GRILLET
Do you know Borges’s preface to Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel? In it, Borges maintains that all the great novels of the twentieth century are detective novels, and he mentions Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Kafka’s The Castle, and many others. Then he explains why. It seems that the structure of police investigation is very close to the technique of modern novels, in particular the non-resolved investigation, as in The Castle. The difference is that in the traditional detective novel there must be a solution, whereas in ours there is just the principle of investigation. Detective novels are consumer products, sold by millions, and are made in the following way: there are clues to an event, say a murder, and someone comes along and puts the the pieces together in order that truth may be revealed. Then it all makes sense. In our novels what is missing is “sense.” There is a constant appeal to sense, but it remains unfulfilled, because the pieces keep moving and shifting and when “sense” appears it is transitory. Therefore, what is important is not to discover the truth at the end of the investigation, but the process itself.
March 16, 2022
Alain Robbe-Grillet’den okuduğum ilk kitap, çok farklı, çok zekice yazılmış bir polisiye-dedektiflik romanı. Aslında bana deneysel bir roman gibi geldi, gerçek polisiyelerdeki gibi bir olay etrafında örülmüyor roman. Bir cinayet var ama suç oluşmamış, öldürülen biri var ama kişi henüz ölmemiş, gerçek ile düşsel kavramlar birbiri üzerinde kayıyor, roman sonunda üstüste çakışıyor.
Tüm olay tabancadan çıkan kurşunun 24 saat sonra amacına ulaşması üzerine kurgulanmış. Kurgular o kadar çok ki beyin jimnastiğini kaçınılmaz kılıyor. A. Robbe-Grillet tanımlama ustası, mekanları, nesneleri, kişileri mükemmel betimliyor. Zaman kavramını eğip büküyor, geri dönüşler, dönüş içindeki tekrar başa dönüşler baş döndürücü güzellikte. Yeni-modern roman yazarından yeni bir tarz polisiye okumak hem keyif verdi hem de polisiye ile aramdaki buzları eritti diyebilirim.
Kitabı okuduktan sonra lütfen aşağıdaki “Nevcihan”ın yorumunu okuyun, kitap çok daha iyi oturacaktır zihninizde.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Tüm olay tabancadan çıkan kurşunun 24 saat sonra amacına ulaşması üzerine kurgulanmış. Kurgular o kadar çok ki beyin jimnastiğini kaçınılmaz kılıyor. A. Robbe-Grillet tanımlama ustası, mekanları, nesneleri, kişileri mükemmel betimliyor. Zaman kavramını eğip büküyor, geri dönüşler, dönüş içindeki tekrar başa dönüşler baş döndürücü güzellikte. Yeni-modern roman yazarından yeni bir tarz polisiye okumak hem keyif verdi hem de polisiye ile aramdaki buzları eritti diyebilirim.
Kitabı okuduktan sonra lütfen aşağıdaki “Nevcihan”ın yorumunu okuyun, kitap çok daha iyi oturacaktır zihninizde.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
June 12, 2018
Nightmare Noir
The noir mood is familiar to anyone who has read one of the Inspector Maigret novels of Georges Simenon. The bleary-eyed proprietor of a small bar in a French provincial town gets up at dawn to take the chairs from off the tables and wipe their stained marble tops; he is almost sleep-walking. Eventually, the waiter arrives, excitedly carrying the morning paper. There has been a murder in the very next street.
Or has there? There seems to be some discrepancy as to the victim's name: Daniel Dupont, a reclusive professor, or Albert Dupont, a shipping merchant? Also some doubt as to whether the was killed or merely wounded. And what has become of the body? Wallas, the stranger who arrived the previous night to rent a room, may have something to do with it, but he has gone out before dawn. We see him wandering through the town in the early hours, heading down endless grey streets from the docks to the city center, but taking for ever to get there. From time to time in the book, he will go into a shop to buy an eraser, but can never find the one he wants. Time and space seem entirely fluid; characters morph from one into another; the only thing tying the story down is an obsessive cataloguing of small detail. [As I read this in French, I will give all quotations both in the originals and my own translations; open whichever version you want.]
French:This, of course, is Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad, writing in 1953; Les gommes (The Erasers) was his first novel, and the combination of detailed visual description and vagueness in most other respects is a hallmark of the nouveau roman, which he virtually invented. That staircase will come back in the book again and again, in different contexts, often mutually contradictory. The entire novel is a web of simple acts and shape-shifting repetitions. Robbe-Grillet takes the conventions of the policier or French detective novel and turns them on their head. You might think that the genre is a model of logical deduction, a chain of clues leading to the inevitable denouement. But this is where Robbe-Grillet goes his own way. Wallas, who turns out to be a detective, realizes that he may be investigating a murder that has not yet taken place. And where's the mystery? Quite early on, we meet the man who shot Daniel (or was it Albert?) Dupont, we meet his boss, we meet the local chief of police who does not even bother to investigate, but we do not know how all these fit together. The more solutions we find, the more the mystery deepens. The déjà vu quality begins to extend beyond the novel itself. That drunkard in a raincoat who keeps on turning up to ask meaningless riddles ("What is the animal that is black, that steals, and has six feet?"), where have we seen him before? Perhaps in Oedipus…?
English:
French:
English:
My first reaction on reading this, as I said, was to look back to Georges Simenon. But almost immediately after came another one, to look forward to Patrick Modiano. Modiano was still a child, of course, when this was written, but he would surely have grown up reading noir novels as a boy, and so have been interested in Robbe-Grillet's repurposing of them when he began to think of becoming a writer himself. There is no great surprise that both authors should have chosen to write against the same tradition. What struck me is how many of the techniques of the nouveau roman Modiano also inherited. Those obsessive lists, for example: just think of Modiano's catalogs of place names, or people, or books. That wandering through the back streets of a city. That fluid sense of identity. Both authors are existential, questioning the nature of being. But while Modiano's references all point outwards to the real world—streets you can find on a map, people who actually existed, his own family history—Robbe-Grillet's all turn inwards and lose themselves in the pages of his book. Which, for me, makes Modiano the greater writer.
[The photographs (both of Paris, however) are by René-Jacques: Café des vents (1947) and Montmartre (1970).]
June 28, 2023
This is certainly an enigmatic book, not at all what one would expect from a detective story and requiring (in my view) at least 2 re-reads. Robbe-Grillet seems to be playing games with the reader and leading him/her up several garden paths. Although theoretically the protagonist appears to be investigating a murder (which may or may not have taken place), he may also be living out a 'modern' version of the Oedipus myth. The plot, if it may be called that, keeps the reader's attention while the lengthy descriptions introduce us to one of the most famous aspects of the nouveau roman of the 1950s. I would not recommend this to a reader wanting a traditional detective story but I did enjoy it and would consider reading more of Robbe-Grillet's work.
July 5, 2020
Robbe-Grillet isn't known for his storytelling prowess, but THE ERASERS offers an intricately plotted and satisfying inversion of the traditional detective narrative. Every clue, false lead, and theory builds throughout the final chapter, generating an unusual sense of suspense, culminating in the elegant revelation of the final pages.
There's also his trademark use of repetitions, detailed descriptions, submerged psychology, and objects which stand in for emotion -- his style appears here basically fully formed. In the shifting perspectives and overlaid version of the Oedipus myth, you can also spot the influence of Joyce, albeit in a hardboiled register. A remarkable debut novel.
4.5 stars
There's also his trademark use of repetitions, detailed descriptions, submerged psychology, and objects which stand in for emotion -- his style appears here basically fully formed. In the shifting perspectives and overlaid version of the Oedipus myth, you can also spot the influence of Joyce, albeit in a hardboiled register. A remarkable debut novel.
4.5 stars
July 31, 2007
The only time I was ever smart was reading this book in grad school. I cracked it, and the rest of my class thought I was nuts. Then, good ol' Dicky Dillard said, "Even Harold Bloom didn't get it at first."
I've since gone back to being dumb.
I've since gone back to being dumb.
July 22, 2019
Silah patladı mı? İşlendiği söylenen ama ortada olmayan bir suç, düğümü çözmeye gelen ama hep “kaybolan” bir dedektif... Bu romanı suç, adalet, yasa kavramlarının nasıl bir oyun örgüsü içinde bir araya getirildiğini sorgulayarak okuyor insan.
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January 4, 2021Rob-Grije je danas poznat pre svega po tome što je pisao scenario za remekdelo "Prošle godine u Marijenbadu" i po tome što je glavni predstavnik francuskog novog romana. "Gumice" su njegovo rano delo i dosta dobar primer toga šta novi roman jeste, šta je u njemu tačno novo i zanimljivo a šta beskrajno prevaziđeno i, da se ne lažemo, smrtno dosadno.
Naime, kad se prepriča, ovaj roman deluje fascinantno: dok se probijamo kroz matricu detektivskog romana koji se odvija u sivom francuskom gradiću, lagano popuštaju uzročno-posledične veze, hronologija se sistematično zamućuje, a odasvud iskaču vizuelni i semantički nagoveštaji koji upućuju na priču o Edipu, i sve se to postepeno ukršta dok se u finalu ne odigra još jedna repriza Edipovog oceubistva - i kao što Edip pokušava da pronađe Lajevog ubicu, tako i ovde mladi detektiv koji istražuje ubistvo zapravo hrli ka njegovom izvršenju.
MEĐUTIM. Sve je to napisano mrtvački i monotono. Jeste svaka kockica uglavljena gde treba, a svaki smarački repetetivni opis funkcionalan kao deo celine. Ali, naprosto, nema Alena Renea da od toga napravi hipnotički i prelep film nego ostanemo na jednom mlakom pastišu Edgara Valasa za intelektualce (baš Valasa jer je i ime detektiva mali omaž u tom smeru).
Naime, kad se prepriča, ovaj roman deluje fascinantno: dok se probijamo kroz matricu detektivskog romana koji se odvija u sivom francuskom gradiću, lagano popuštaju uzročno-posledične veze, hronologija se sistematično zamućuje, a odasvud iskaču vizuelni i semantički nagoveštaji koji upućuju na priču o Edipu, i sve se to postepeno ukršta dok se u finalu ne odigra još jedna repriza Edipovog oceubistva - i kao što Edip pokušava da pronađe Lajevog ubicu, tako i ovde mladi detektiv koji istražuje ubistvo zapravo hrli ka njegovom izvršenju.
MEĐUTIM. Sve je to napisano mrtvački i monotono. Jeste svaka kockica uglavljena gde treba, a svaki smarački repetetivni opis funkcionalan kao deo celine. Ali, naprosto, nema Alena Renea da od toga napravi hipnotički i prelep film nego ostanemo na jednom mlakom pastišu Edgara Valasa za intelektualce (baš Valasa jer je i ime detektiva mali omaž u tom smeru).
February 9, 2024
This was even better than I expected. A detective arrives in town to investigate what has been reported as a murder. He's trying to work out not only who might have done it but even if the murder occurred at all.
Confusion is piled on confusion as we get lost in a labyrinth of possibilities.
What pleasantly surprised me was that the novel has quite a satisfying (at least for me) conclusion
Confusion is piled on confusion as we get lost in a labyrinth of possibilities.
What pleasantly surprised me was that the novel has quite a satisfying (at least for me) conclusion
September 20, 2010
Robbe-Grillet in noir-est noir form for his first published novel. Even in a story of detection and murder, of course, his prose is highly subjective and filled with ambiguous repetition of detail. These tendencies were mostly early in their arc of development at this point, though, meaning the clearest plotting of anything I've read from him, but also less of that rarefied aesthetic atmosphere that continually permeated his work thereafter. It reads like Robbe-Grillet, but doesn't entirely feel like him. And it is the feeling he creates, so hard to describe but so strangely magnetic, which seems his strongest point. Still, this was often fascinating in its own right.
July 6, 2019
Such a brand new experience! This was the most unusual novel I could think of! At some point you realize it's an adaptation of Oedipus Rex but then everything is so weird in it. It's a story that unfolds in 24 hours, plus a bit of flashbacks, so... pretty aristotelean! Then you see this whole bunch of telling and retelling and re-retelling where on each occasion the narrative is partially different. I have been reading this book beside another one which is a series of speeches by Alain Robbe Grillet and his takes on the Nouveau Roman and how it started and how it evolved; this was really helpful and I definitely suggest if you have not had any "training" on this sort of literature, try to read or listen to Robbe Grillet's reasoning about it and how, for example, the French novel from Balzac evolved into Flaubert, out of whom Nouveau Roman was constructed! Tgere are peculiarities that you need to get used to and at the beginning they seem a bit boring!
The goal in my opinion, is to demolish the reliability of an omnisapient narrator who tells you everything and you follow them blindly! The narrator in this book says things over and over, 24 hours in around 330 pages, and they vary each time! This could actually be very interesting from a husserlian point of view, we remember things differently each time because everytime we remember them we are basically a different person and we are looking at what we remember from a different perspective... So remembering is an act of present, not of past...
Plus: some memories in the book are told using past verbs, then retold using present verbs! This is so weird!!
The main issue that drives the book, in this case: a murder, is neither solved and nor has it even occurred... And the reader comes to know this fact pretty early! Robbe Grillet has made movies too and although he used to say when there was an idea in his mind he would immediately know whether it was a book or a movie, this book seemed very movie-like to me... Definitely a great reading, and reading it in French made it even greater!
The goal in my opinion, is to demolish the reliability of an omnisapient narrator who tells you everything and you follow them blindly! The narrator in this book says things over and over, 24 hours in around 330 pages, and they vary each time! This could actually be very interesting from a husserlian point of view, we remember things differently each time because everytime we remember them we are basically a different person and we are looking at what we remember from a different perspective... So remembering is an act of present, not of past...
Plus: some memories in the book are told using past verbs, then retold using present verbs! This is so weird!!
The main issue that drives the book, in this case: a murder, is neither solved and nor has it even occurred... And the reader comes to know this fact pretty early! Robbe Grillet has made movies too and although he used to say when there was an idea in his mind he would immediately know whether it was a book or a movie, this book seemed very movie-like to me... Definitely a great reading, and reading it in French made it even greater!
June 6, 2013
I began reading this book three years ago, read about 75% of it, then I had to put it aside when I started grad school. I recently picked it up again and started from the beginning once more. I'm pretty sure that this was the best way to read this book. It is a time and thought consuming read and you will benefit by re-reading parts or all of it. Read, repeat, read, repeat.
This book is a bumbling comedic novel layered in a dark, mysterious tone. As I came to the end of the book I laughed at loud as I realized what was unfolding.
Includes on of the best descriptions of a tomato I have read.
I think this would make a really great dark comedy movie.
This book is a bumbling comedic novel layered in a dark, mysterious tone. As I came to the end of the book I laughed at loud as I realized what was unfolding.
Includes on of the best descriptions of a tomato I have read.
I think this would make a really great dark comedy movie.
March 27, 2008
Allain Robbe-Grillet is one of those writers one either gets or not gets. Care or not care. I care, but do i get? I don't know, but I do enjoy his writings and it brings me back to a time when you can get experimental fiction published by a big publishing house at your local bookstore. Things are a tad different these days...
So what we have here is a thriller of sorts. The subjectivity erased out of the narration. An interesting read, and everyone should read Robbe-Grillet at least once.
So what we have here is a thriller of sorts. The subjectivity erased out of the narration. An interesting read, and everyone should read Robbe-Grillet at least once.
July 15, 2024
Ο δολοφόνος, το θύμα του, ο επιθεωρήτης του εγκλήματος και ο προιστάμενος του.
Όταν πήγα πρόσφατα σε ένα απο τα αγαπημένα μου μικρά βιβλιοπωλεία του Λονδίνου και καθώς κοιτούσα τα ράφια για να δώ τι θα πάρω, είδα σε περίοπτη θέση το The Erasers του Alain Robbe-Grillet. Βλέποντας τίτλο και συγγραφέα, σκέφτηκα πως μου είναι γνωστά και αφότου τσέκαρα τις λίστες μου είδα πως όντως το είχα βάλει στη λίστα. Αγνοούσα όμως πως είχε βγει και σε αγγλική έκδοση. Όταν πήγα να πληρώσω μου είπε ο ταμίας πως είναι καλό βιβλίο και χαίρεται που επιτέλους θα βρει κάποια καινούργια στέγη, καθώς το είχε καιρό εκεί μπροστά, αλλά κανείς δεν το έπαιρνε.
Το βιβλίο αφορά την εξιχνίαση μιας σειράς δολοφονιών με επίκεντρο τις τελευταίες 24 ώρες απο την δολοφονία του τελευταίου θύματος. Φαινομενικά, πρόκειται για το έργο μιας πολιτικής τρομοκρατικής οργάνωσης, που σκοπεύει στο να εξοντώσει σημαίνοντα πρόσωπα της άρχουσας τάξης(;). Στην μικρή πόλη όπου λαμβάνει χώρα η πιο πρόσφατη δολοφονία σπεύδει ο μυστικός πράκτορας Γουάλας για να διευρενήσει την υπόθεση.
Ναι, είναι μια απλή ιστορία ίσως και τετριμμένη, μιας και το βιβλίο γράφτηκε το 1953. Αλλά ότι ενδεχομένως χάνει σε πλοκή το κερδίζει στα υπόλοιπα στοιχεία του: στυλ, ύφος, και δομή όλα λειτουργούν στο να μπερδέψουν το πραγματικό με το φανταστικό και να δημιουργήσουν αμφιβολίες για αυτό που διαβάζουμε. Η χρονική ανακατανομή των γεγονότων, οι απότομες εναλλαγές και ένα αρκετά δυνατό φινάλε δίνουν μια πολύ ωραία αντίληψη για το τι μπορεί να είναι το νουάρ. Βάσει των λίγων πραγμάτων που έχω διαβάσει το βιβλίο θεωρείται αρκετά επιδραστικό στη Γαλλία, καθώς έχει πολλά στοιχεία τα οποία χρησιμοποίησε η Nouvelle Vague στον κινηματογράφο μερικά χρόνια αργότερα.
Όσο περνάει ο καιρός τόσο περισσότερο μου αρέσει το γαλλικό πολιτικό νουάρ. Ας όψεται ο Μωρίς Άττια που με εισήγαγε δυναμικά στο χώρο.
Όταν πήγα πρόσφατα σε ένα απο τα αγαπημένα μου μικρά βιβλιοπωλεία του Λονδίνου και καθώς κοιτούσα τα ράφια για να δώ τι θα πάρω, είδα σε περίοπτη θέση το The Erasers του Alain Robbe-Grillet. Βλέποντας τίτλο και συγγραφέα, σκέφτηκα πως μου είναι γνωστά και αφότου τσέκαρα τις λίστες μου είδα πως όντως το είχα βάλει στη λίστα. Αγνοούσα όμως πως είχε βγει και σε αγγλική έκδοση. Όταν πήγα να πληρώσω μου είπε ο ταμίας πως είναι καλό βιβλίο και χαίρεται που επιτέλους θα βρει κάποια καινούργια στέγη, καθώς το είχε καιρό εκεί μπροστά, αλλά κανείς δεν το έπαιρνε.
Το βιβλίο αφορά την εξιχνίαση μιας σειράς δολοφονιών με επίκεντρο τις τελευταίες 24 ώρες απο την δολοφονία του τελευταίου θύματος. Φαινομενικά, πρόκειται για το έργο μιας πολιτικής τρομοκρατικής οργάνωσης, που σκοπεύει στο να εξοντώσει σημαίνοντα πρόσωπα της άρχουσας τάξης(;). Στην μικρή πόλη όπου λαμβάνει χώρα η πιο πρόσφατη δολοφονία σπεύδει ο μυστικός πράκτορας Γουάλας για να διευρενήσει την υπόθεση.
Ναι, είναι μια απλή ιστορία ίσως και τετριμμένη, μιας και το βιβλίο γράφτηκε το 1953. Αλλά ότι ενδεχομένως χάνει σε πλοκή το κερδίζει στα υπόλοιπα στοιχεία του: στυλ, ύφος, και δομή όλα λειτουργούν στο να μπερδέψουν το πραγματικό με το φανταστικό και να δημιουργήσουν αμφιβολίες για αυτό που διαβάζουμε. Η χρονική ανακατανομή των γεγονότων, οι απότομες εναλλαγές και ένα αρκετά δυνατό φινάλε δίνουν μια πολύ ωραία αντίληψη για το τι μπορεί να είναι το νουάρ. Βάσει των λίγων πραγμάτων που έχω διαβάσει το βιβλίο θεωρείται αρκετά επιδραστικό στη Γαλλία, καθώς έχει πολλά στοιχεία τα οποία χρησιμοποίησε η Nouvelle Vague στον κινηματογράφο μερικά χρόνια αργότερα.
Όσο περνάει ο καιρός τόσο περισσότερο μου αρέσει το γαλλικό πολιτικό νουάρ. Ας όψεται ο Μωρίς Άττια που με εισήγαγε δυναμικά στο χώρο.
March 2, 2012
For my full review, please visit Casual Debris.
Perhaps the most notable member of the group of experimental authors practicing the tenets of the Nouveau Roman (New Novel), Alain Robbe-Grillet's first novel is a fascinating, fun and frustrating murder mystery. It deals with a detective by the name of Wallas who is sent to an unnamed town to investigate the murder of Economics Professor Daniel Dupont. The murder is believed to be linked to a series of eight other murders occurring across the country over the past eight days, each at precisely 7:30 P.M. What's different about this particular murder is that there is no body, and moreover, unknown to Wallas but revealed early to the reader, is that Dupont is in fact not dead.
There are many wonderful aspects to this novel. The setting itself is incredibly well designed, and the nameless town becomes a familiar geography. Characters are colourful, at times comical and often pathetic, like the detective Wallas who is cursed with poor phrenological features which he suspects are linked to his constant failings, while he roams the streets almost at a loss as to how to investigate. The premise that his career is to be judged on the merits of whether or not he can solve a murder that never happened is masterful tragic irony. His fate is perfectly summed up by the fact that he regularly pauses in his investigations to search for a pencil eraser that he remembers well but that may not even exist. Erasers are plentiful throughout the novel, from the pencil erasers to more subtle suggestions, such as pervasive forgetfulness, changing or replacing facts and even actual events, along with the conspiracies that these nine murders were part of a series of hits conducted by hit-men, or "erasers."
The novel contains a number of recurring elements, from notions of duality to the idea that everything and everyone is mirrored. Wallas has an uncanny resemblance to the main suspect in this case, and is constantly being mistaken for that other, shadowy individual. People and objects have their twins and their alternates, as do events which are constantly repeating themselves. It is almost as though the novel is only one link from a never-ending cycle. The bar that opens and closes the novel is described as an aquarium, so that all its inhabitants are fish living in a glass bowl, swimming around in eternal circles.
Perhaps the most notable member of the group of experimental authors practicing the tenets of the Nouveau Roman (New Novel), Alain Robbe-Grillet's first novel is a fascinating, fun and frustrating murder mystery. It deals with a detective by the name of Wallas who is sent to an unnamed town to investigate the murder of Economics Professor Daniel Dupont. The murder is believed to be linked to a series of eight other murders occurring across the country over the past eight days, each at precisely 7:30 P.M. What's different about this particular murder is that there is no body, and moreover, unknown to Wallas but revealed early to the reader, is that Dupont is in fact not dead.
There are many wonderful aspects to this novel. The setting itself is incredibly well designed, and the nameless town becomes a familiar geography. Characters are colourful, at times comical and often pathetic, like the detective Wallas who is cursed with poor phrenological features which he suspects are linked to his constant failings, while he roams the streets almost at a loss as to how to investigate. The premise that his career is to be judged on the merits of whether or not he can solve a murder that never happened is masterful tragic irony. His fate is perfectly summed up by the fact that he regularly pauses in his investigations to search for a pencil eraser that he remembers well but that may not even exist. Erasers are plentiful throughout the novel, from the pencil erasers to more subtle suggestions, such as pervasive forgetfulness, changing or replacing facts and even actual events, along with the conspiracies that these nine murders were part of a series of hits conducted by hit-men, or "erasers."
The novel contains a number of recurring elements, from notions of duality to the idea that everything and everyone is mirrored. Wallas has an uncanny resemblance to the main suspect in this case, and is constantly being mistaken for that other, shadowy individual. People and objects have their twins and their alternates, as do events which are constantly repeating themselves. It is almost as though the novel is only one link from a never-ending cycle. The bar that opens and closes the novel is described as an aquarium, so that all its inhabitants are fish living in a glass bowl, swimming around in eternal circles.
October 14, 2024
The Erasers [1953] – ★★★★
French author Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922 –2008) was one of the main proponents of the experimental Nouveau Roman (French New Novel) style in literature. In this book of his, translated from the French by Richard Howard, the story concerns special agent Wallas who arrives to one obscure Flemish town to investigate the murder of one Professor Dupont. He is only yet another one dead in the series of gruesome murders that have already been committed in town: “in nine days, nine violent deaths have occurred one after another, of which at least six are definitely murders” [Robbe-Grillet/Howard, 1953/64: 57]. One possible witness is Professor Dupont’s housekeeper Madame Smite, but she cannot provide any help. On the scene was also Doctor Juard, who took the victim, the wounded man, to the hospital where he allegedly died. Commissioner Laurent and Wallas have started a murder investigation, seeking an assassin, but was there even a murder? Was there even an assassin? Then, there emerges one horrifying and unbelievable possibility – did the guilty man himself [took] charge of the investigation? [1953/64: 200]. What is the truth? The Erasers is a mystery novel that constantly questions reality, offering multiple perspectives on the same situation. It is a refreshingly different, kaleidoscopic murder mystery that puts the absurdity and the ambiguity front and centre.
From the very first page, Robbe-Grillet takes an unusual approach in his story. It is set against a rather grim urban landscape of one industrial city. That small town atmosphere and hints of conspiracy and bigger drama lurking behind the quietness of country life are reminiscent of the work of Simenon, but the dreamy plot where events sometimes repeat themselves and come full circle seems to be the author’s own invention. In fact, The Erasers has been called a literary ouroboros (in mythology, this was a serpent that ate its own tail) because of the circular nature of the story.
Special Agent Wallas finds himself in some labyrinthic streets, often lost while trying to (unsuccessfully) buy very special erasers in newsagent’s shops. Questions upon questions pile up in his tricky investigation and soon names are dropped: Assassin Garinati, Merchant Marchant, some Group Leader Bona and Chief Fabius. Every character seems to have a hidden agenda, and Commissioner Laurent soon has plenty of versions of what might have happened to Professor Dupont, among which are a botched burglary, a murder by a terrorist organisation and a suicide. Strange witnesses emerge, including a man who pestered the supposed murderer just after or before the commission of his crime and Dupont’s estranged wife. There seems to be no end to possibilities of what happened to the murdered man, but paradoxically and ironically it turns out that the most “common sense” and logical possibility is also the most unbelievable one.
Perhaps at times unnecessarily confusing, The Erasers is also quite suspenseful. In fact, it is clear that Alain Robbe-Grillet can hold his reader’s attention in this story almost effortlessly, pulling them into his narrative whose intrigue grows with each page turned. Every word and sentence seem to be weighted and the reader is caught in almost Hitchcockian suspense. The author “plays” with the reader the way the story characters seems “to play” with each other. Time and space shift in the story and that is why Robbe-Grillet’s work is often described as being metaphysical in nature. There is a collective omniscient narrative, that seems to know the thoughts of individual characters, and each of them at some point is “narrating” the story from their own unique perspective. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between perceptions, ideas, guesses, flashbacks and pseudo-flashbacks, on the one hand, and the objective reality, on the other. Memories also “intervene” when individual characters “voice” their thoughts. But, does objective reality even exists? The “reality” at any given point seems to be made up of other people’s thoughts, feelings and perceptions and all only about their perceivable facts. Facts do change in this detective story and that also depends on who you are in the story. The author seems to be asking another question, too: can reality, facts or truth be guessed by paying close attention to certain seemingly innocuous objects in this story?
🗝 The Erasers turns the concept of a murder mystery on its head and deconstructs the so-called traditional French novel. With its strong sense of a film noir that inexplicably mixes reality and fantasy, The Erasers is one idiosyncratic, uncanny novel whose reality is complex and that constantly puts its readers’ perceptions to the test, compounding and confusing such basic murder mystery concepts as investigators and criminals, suspects and victims, and the dead and the living.
French author Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922 –2008) was one of the main proponents of the experimental Nouveau Roman (French New Novel) style in literature. In this book of his, translated from the French by Richard Howard, the story concerns special agent Wallas who arrives to one obscure Flemish town to investigate the murder of one Professor Dupont. He is only yet another one dead in the series of gruesome murders that have already been committed in town: “in nine days, nine violent deaths have occurred one after another, of which at least six are definitely murders” [Robbe-Grillet/Howard, 1953/64: 57]. One possible witness is Professor Dupont’s housekeeper Madame Smite, but she cannot provide any help. On the scene was also Doctor Juard, who took the victim, the wounded man, to the hospital where he allegedly died. Commissioner Laurent and Wallas have started a murder investigation, seeking an assassin, but was there even a murder? Was there even an assassin? Then, there emerges one horrifying and unbelievable possibility – did the guilty man himself [took] charge of the investigation? [1953/64: 200]. What is the truth? The Erasers is a mystery novel that constantly questions reality, offering multiple perspectives on the same situation. It is a refreshingly different, kaleidoscopic murder mystery that puts the absurdity and the ambiguity front and centre.
From the very first page, Robbe-Grillet takes an unusual approach in his story. It is set against a rather grim urban landscape of one industrial city. That small town atmosphere and hints of conspiracy and bigger drama lurking behind the quietness of country life are reminiscent of the work of Simenon, but the dreamy plot where events sometimes repeat themselves and come full circle seems to be the author’s own invention. In fact, The Erasers has been called a literary ouroboros (in mythology, this was a serpent that ate its own tail) because of the circular nature of the story.
Special Agent Wallas finds himself in some labyrinthic streets, often lost while trying to (unsuccessfully) buy very special erasers in newsagent’s shops. Questions upon questions pile up in his tricky investigation and soon names are dropped: Assassin Garinati, Merchant Marchant, some Group Leader Bona and Chief Fabius. Every character seems to have a hidden agenda, and Commissioner Laurent soon has plenty of versions of what might have happened to Professor Dupont, among which are a botched burglary, a murder by a terrorist organisation and a suicide. Strange witnesses emerge, including a man who pestered the supposed murderer just after or before the commission of his crime and Dupont’s estranged wife. There seems to be no end to possibilities of what happened to the murdered man, but paradoxically and ironically it turns out that the most “common sense” and logical possibility is also the most unbelievable one.
Perhaps at times unnecessarily confusing, The Erasers is also quite suspenseful. In fact, it is clear that Alain Robbe-Grillet can hold his reader’s attention in this story almost effortlessly, pulling them into his narrative whose intrigue grows with each page turned. Every word and sentence seem to be weighted and the reader is caught in almost Hitchcockian suspense. The author “plays” with the reader the way the story characters seems “to play” with each other. Time and space shift in the story and that is why Robbe-Grillet’s work is often described as being metaphysical in nature. There is a collective omniscient narrative, that seems to know the thoughts of individual characters, and each of them at some point is “narrating” the story from their own unique perspective. It becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between perceptions, ideas, guesses, flashbacks and pseudo-flashbacks, on the one hand, and the objective reality, on the other. Memories also “intervene” when individual characters “voice” their thoughts. But, does objective reality even exists? The “reality” at any given point seems to be made up of other people’s thoughts, feelings and perceptions and all only about their perceivable facts. Facts do change in this detective story and that also depends on who you are in the story. The author seems to be asking another question, too: can reality, facts or truth be guessed by paying close attention to certain seemingly innocuous objects in this story?
🗝 The Erasers turns the concept of a murder mystery on its head and deconstructs the so-called traditional French novel. With its strong sense of a film noir that inexplicably mixes reality and fantasy, The Erasers is one idiosyncratic, uncanny novel whose reality is complex and that constantly puts its readers’ perceptions to the test, compounding and confusing such basic murder mystery concepts as investigators and criminals, suspects and victims, and the dead and the living.
Read
September 18, 2020I am not ashamed to say that I didn't get this. I adore Robbe-Grillet's work, but this one was just a bit too opaque for me, with none of the teeth-rattling tension that markes some of his best novels. Now I get that this must have had a lot more meaning in the political climate of France at the time, what with the Algerian and Vietnamese imbroglios on everyone's mind, and De Gaulle's merry march into the halls of power. And I get that this is more of a puzzle box to work on than a novel. I consider myself to be a pretty sophisticated reader – I'm on a first name basis with Thomas (Pynchon) dontcha know – but this was a bridge too far at the time. Maybe I'll have to give it another go.
December 15, 2009
This book reminded me a little of a David Lynch movie—specifically, Blue Velvet. Not so much in terms of theme or plot (although both involve detectives), but style. Robbe-Grillet describes seemingly mundane objects and scenes with intense details, much in the way that Lynch zooms in with extreme close-ups. The effect is peculiar and eerie and leaves much for the observer to conclude for him/herself.
Overall, I think I like Djinn a bit better than The Erasers, but the latter is definitely worth the read. It’s actually not quite as surreal as I thought it would be, and I think it dragged a little in the middle, but it picks up by the end and gives a satisfying conclusion.
Overall, I think I like Djinn a bit better than The Erasers, but the latter is definitely worth the read. It’s actually not quite as surreal as I thought it would be, and I think it dragged a little in the middle, but it picks up by the end and gives a satisfying conclusion.
July 25, 2024
if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com
130519 read in french: i have read this before in translation years (decades...) past, 3rd r-g i think. since then have read some litcrit, more r-g, arguments that this shows his early development past 'un regicide'. also that this is avant-garde treatment of detective crime subgenre: the failed detective, where investigation seems plausible, believable, redemptive etc... but everything ends wrong, crime not solved, criminals never caught, faith in reason derailed etc. in lit, examples include auster's The New York Trilogy, durrenmatt's The Pledge. famous film is 'chinatown'. so, fun literary games. but then i have never been as interested in solutions, detection, resolution etc, as in 'mystery', rather portraits of why the crime and psychology described how...
i enjoy again working on my french. more fun than reading dictionaries... r-g is not yet stylistically 'peak', for me, but part of obsessive mapping of this city, 'the circular boulevard', the intersecting streets, canals, careful reconstruction of crime/detective search, when now, when then, has dual function of r-g avant-garde poetics and detective-fiction presentation of just the facts, madame. perhaps this draws unwary readers into games of detection, but of course who did it is never as important as how the investigation is told. not my fun. but as far as reading it in french, this was good for vocabulary, grammar... but as i was always busy working on words, i may have lost the plot....
i read one assertion that r-g goes further than disrupting faith of the reader in detective, detecting, reason, time, place, as usual 'failed detective', but also subtly/subversively, undermines even the closest reader (lit critics) of the value of embedded 'symbols', of 'signs' in general, pointing to anything, myth, science, art theory etc, outside the work to explain it. eg. why is this called 'les gommes' (the erasers)?... careful with your reading... not my favourite r-g in either french or english but probably essental to read if you read him...
about buried symbols of Oedipal reference,.. i think it is sroltzfus’s criticism that suggests this is actually an example of r-g deliberately misleading close textual readers (critics) by offering an incoherent but plausible ‘mythic resonance’ against r-g’s insistence that there is nothing- absolutely nothing- outside the text giving it ‘meaning’... thus frustrating the literary detective in all those lit-critics... but then who is an author to say what is or is not meaningful in his work: it is there, he wrote it, he has now no more privileged critical insight than anyone else...
reference: Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Body of the Text
by Ben Stoltzfus
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
130519 read in french: i have read this before in translation years (decades...) past, 3rd r-g i think. since then have read some litcrit, more r-g, arguments that this shows his early development past 'un regicide'. also that this is avant-garde treatment of detective crime subgenre: the failed detective, where investigation seems plausible, believable, redemptive etc... but everything ends wrong, crime not solved, criminals never caught, faith in reason derailed etc. in lit, examples include auster's The New York Trilogy, durrenmatt's The Pledge. famous film is 'chinatown'. so, fun literary games. but then i have never been as interested in solutions, detection, resolution etc, as in 'mystery', rather portraits of why the crime and psychology described how...
i enjoy again working on my french. more fun than reading dictionaries... r-g is not yet stylistically 'peak', for me, but part of obsessive mapping of this city, 'the circular boulevard', the intersecting streets, canals, careful reconstruction of crime/detective search, when now, when then, has dual function of r-g avant-garde poetics and detective-fiction presentation of just the facts, madame. perhaps this draws unwary readers into games of detection, but of course who did it is never as important as how the investigation is told. not my fun. but as far as reading it in french, this was good for vocabulary, grammar... but as i was always busy working on words, i may have lost the plot....
i read one assertion that r-g goes further than disrupting faith of the reader in detective, detecting, reason, time, place, as usual 'failed detective', but also subtly/subversively, undermines even the closest reader (lit critics) of the value of embedded 'symbols', of 'signs' in general, pointing to anything, myth, science, art theory etc, outside the work to explain it. eg. why is this called 'les gommes' (the erasers)?... careful with your reading... not my favourite r-g in either french or english but probably essental to read if you read him...
about buried symbols of Oedipal reference,.. i think it is sroltzfus’s criticism that suggests this is actually an example of r-g deliberately misleading close textual readers (critics) by offering an incoherent but plausible ‘mythic resonance’ against r-g’s insistence that there is nothing- absolutely nothing- outside the text giving it ‘meaning’... thus frustrating the literary detective in all those lit-critics... but then who is an author to say what is or is not meaningful in his work: it is there, he wrote it, he has now no more privileged critical insight than anyone else...
reference: Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Body of the Text
by Ben Stoltzfus
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
December 18, 2015
3.5
A special agent arrives in a bland harbor town to investigate the most recent death in a series of linked murders believed to be carried out by a terrorist organization. The agent's resemblance to the prime suspect leads the story into murky territory. This is Robbe-Grillet's first novel and it prefigures his later trademark narrative techniques and stylistic preoccupations, including the blurring of character roles, reinvention and reconfiguring of key scenes, and obsessive attention to the precise description of objects and the surroundings in which they are situated. Here these elements are slow to appear and not as defining of the text as in his later novels, but when they do expand in prominence, the book becomes more interesting. This could be a good place for readers to start with R-G, and if the disorienting aspects of the book hold appeal, it's likely a good sign to keep reading farther into his oeuvre.
February 28, 2015
پاک کن ها، اولین کتاب منتشر شده رب گریه است، و شاید بهترینشان. در زمان نوشتن این کتاب، رب-گریه، هنوز رمان نو نویس نبود، هنوز رولان بارت «ادبیات شیئیه» را به نوشتار او نسبت نداده بود، هنوز قصد تحول کلیت رمان در میان نبود.
در این زمان، رب-گریه نویسنده ای جوان بود، که از جویس، کافکا و فاکنر تاثیر گرفته بود، و می خواست رمانی بنویسد نزدیک به این نویسندگان مهم، و نسبتا متفاوت با آثار کلاسیک، به خصوص بالزاک. هنوز در نظر او خواننده اهمیت خودش را از دست نداده و مجبور نیست که صفحات زیادی از توصیف های عجیب و غریب را تحمل کند.
در پاک کن ها، همه چیز خوب است، همه چیز معقول و آرام است (با وجود پیچیدگی نسبی داستان) و ما، امروز می توانیم بفهمیم که این سکوت، تنها نشانه ای است برای شروع طوفان. طوفانی به نام رمان نو.
در این زمان، رب-گریه نویسنده ای جوان بود، که از جویس، کافکا و فاکنر تاثیر گرفته بود، و می خواست رمانی بنویسد نزدیک به این نویسندگان مهم، و نسبتا متفاوت با آثار کلاسیک، به خصوص بالزاک. هنوز در نظر او خواننده اهمیت خودش را از دست نداده و مجبور نیست که صفحات زیادی از توصیف های عجیب و غریب را تحمل کند.
در پاک کن ها، همه چیز خوب است، همه چیز معقول و آرام است (با وجود پیچیدگی نسبی داستان) و ما، امروز می توانیم بفهمیم که این سکوت، تنها نشانه ای است برای شروع طوفان. طوفانی به نام رمان نو.
October 31, 2017
If you've ever seen the movie Hot Fuzz, then you can pretty much skip this one. No shit: I don't know if Wright, Pegg, and Frost were riffing on this or not, but the parallels are uncanny. I kept waiting for Jim Broadbent to say, "He had a great big bushy beard!" By no means bad at all, but hard to take very seriously when all you can think of is a buddy-copy/horror pastiche wherein the evildoers wear hooded robes and hold flashlights under their chins. Meh, gimme the Cornetto for Paddy Considine alone. That guy's a revelation. Robbe-Grillet would, er, improve from this first offering. I know, cutting edge criticism...
May 23, 2010
This book played like a movie in my head while I was reading it.
April 22, 2018
everything and everyone in this book is a device. sterile. well constructed, like a bunker.
are nouveau roman and la nouvelle vague the same thing but novel and motion film, respectively? because it feels like a godard movie without the girl. Alphaville without anna.
the blurry transitions in narrative perspective are fun.
oh, what's up with "revolver"? repeated a hundred times. is that the translator's mistake? even has a picture of a revolver in the cover art of the edition i borrowed. the gun in question has a clip, jams, and can utilize a silencer. that's a pistol.
3 stars
are nouveau roman and la nouvelle vague the same thing but novel and motion film, respectively? because it feels like a godard movie without the girl. Alphaville without anna.
the blurry transitions in narrative perspective are fun.
oh, what's up with "revolver"? repeated a hundred times. is that the translator's mistake? even has a picture of a revolver in the cover art of the edition i borrowed. the gun in question has a clip, jams, and can utilize a silencer. that's a pistol.
3 stars
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