Different mediums handle styles of narrative with more success than others. I think that Robbe-Grillet's style is one such example. I loved the film Last Year at Marienbad, which he wrote the screenplay for. The repetitiveness, the continual focus on the details of the hotel, the surreal dreamlike quality worked perfectly. A lot of the same stylistic themes are present in The Voyeur but they make me yawn here. I think some of why it works in the film is that the film is visually captivating, if the same stylistic themes were done by some grungy NYU film students with a hand-held camera and just kept going back to repetitive street scenes around St. Marks Place and the Cube the effect would be ruined. Rather than being a beautiful and interesting piece of art it would be boring pretentious shit that they would be lucky if they could get their closest friends to rent from Kim's Video. That's sort of what I think of this book, kind of boring and pretentious shit that is saved by some moments of really good writing but which ultimately fails to make me either a) care about the novel, b) care to spend anytime wondering 'what it is all about' or c) want to even spend much time bashing. In a way this book is the most perfect three star book on my shelves, is so blaaahhhhhhhhh, so mediocre and inoffensive , so blaaahhhhhhhhhhh. If I were a Seinfeld like comedian I might make a routine out of making fun of this whole French New Novel thing (I'm not going to even give it the benefit of making it sound more important by using the French words). I'd say something like, "What's the deal with this New Novel? What's New about it? Beckett did it. Kafka did it. Joyce did it. Woolf did it. Faulkner did it. Let's just say that Modernism did it, so what's so new in the 1960's about doing it again? What's up with that?" ----oh, but we are decentralizing the narrative by taking away the focus from the subject and putting it on the objects, oui? it is so boring to write about subjects, it is how do you say bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, and we are children of the 60's. Oh, shut the fuck up. This is as revolutionary as the Beats, which is only revolutionary if you've lived your life up until the time the stuff was produced reading nothing but the most drab mainstream shit, lived in a dark closest and had your head shoved so far up your ass that there was no chance of your eyes ever chancing to fall on any Literature. It was reading about the New Novel (I had to find out exactly what was new about it, apparently not much) that made me realize once again how terminally retarded (not as in having down syndrome but as in not progressing) so much of the 1960's was. And if I were the comedian I mentioned above I might also say this, "What's up with all the going back and repeating what you said earlier? Is there a point? I don't see a point, are you being paid by the word? What's up with that? I mean if you are going to destroy linear narrative in a book destroy linear narrative, but don't be a half-assed schmuck about it, what's up with that?" And I point back to my initial comment that this same feature worked great in the film Robbe-Grillet wrote, but in a novel it felt like half-baked silliness.
This was the one which convinced me that I didn't have to finish a book if it became as painful as having my toes gnawed off one by one by the neighbour's strange nine-year-old son. I realised the author was the guy who wrote the script for Last Year at Marienbad which is the all time quintessence of French cinematic 60s avant-gardery. Dig the Wikipedia plot summaryThrough ambiguous flashbacks and disorientating shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships between the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the château's corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers.The characters are unnamed in the film; in the published screenplay, the woman is referred to as "A", the first man is "X", and the man who may be her husband is "M".I'm not saying the book is as bad as the movie, not at all. It's worse. But something happened on page 84, which broke the terrible monotony. I found an insect squashed there. I imagined its last thoughts : Oh no, this is not a large flat black and white flower petal, it's something else... what's that up above me... aargh...I took the tiny corpse to be a sign saying that if I carried on Alain Robbe-Grillet would squash the life out of me too. Metaphors can be helpful, even obvious ones.Thank you little dead bug, you did not die in vain.
What do You think about The Voyeur (1994)?
This book was a major challenge to read, and at the same time an absolute feat of literary cubism. I'm a great reader, and my favorite kinds of books are ones that mess with the reader's head. This may be the most head messing with book I've ever read in my life. Take 'The Stranger' and combine it with the movie 'Pi' and you may have something near 1/2 of the mind-fuckery that this book was. I actually think it would be a fantastic artsy film that about 5 people would ever get. Somewhat like with 'The Lady or the Tiger', we dear readers are left without really knowing what happened. Was it all in his head as a daydream? Is he remembering? Is he schizophrenic? The beginning is the ending and the story loops over and over again, however pay attention throughout to the same story changing in minor detail. Is it whimsy or alibi?Note to the reader: the plot barely pays off, but the style is likely to be unlike anything you've ever read.
—Chris
The Voyeur fits very well the "anti novel" bill; a book that eschews any psychological insight/motivation but leaves one inferring what happens and why while using a very clear and compelling language to present the narrative. If you feel like doing a crossword puzzle or playing a computer game but reading is your passion, try this book and you will get the feel of the above while reading a master of contemporary literature.Do not expect things to be simple, make sense or offer too much of a resolution, just enjoy the flow and the author's superb style and his sense of place and logic
—Liviu
An intricately crafted novel that evokes the same buried dread and mounting tension of a David Lynch movie. The Voyeur develops through a strange sort of dream logic that is absolutely captivating- once acclimated to its experimental structure that explores both narrative structure and the relationship between author/reader/character. Bruce Morrissette from his chapter on the novel in The Novels of Robbe-Grillet:" [...] in The Voyeur, the author -absent, impersonal, but possessing a special "vision" of the universe he creates- imposes his order on the world of the novel and its objects, only then turning it over to his central character. The latter, in turn, struggles with this "reality," projecting his emotive troubles upon it, changing it or attempting to bring about its destruction. [...] Once introduced into the text, this use of free transitions between present action and memory (or imagination) develops rapidly. The reader learns, through stages of increasing difficulty, to follow the system, to distinguish without intervention on the part of the author between reality, dream, memory, and, finally, paroxysmic vision."*This book wasn't just an engaging read, but a fascinating reading experience as well.*The Novels of Robbe-Grillet. Bruce Morrissette. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. [p.86-88].
—Matthew
