Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet (born Aug. 18, 1922, Brest, France — died Feb. 18, 2008, Caen), was a representative writer and leading theoretician of the nouveau roman ("new novel"), French "anti-novel" that emerged in the 1950s, as well as a screenwriter and film director. He is best known in the anglosphere for his screenplay to Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and won the Golden Lion award, the highest prize of the Venice Film Festival, when it came out in 1961. He also won the prestigious Louis Delluc Prize of 1962 for his 1962 film L'Immortelle ("The Immortal One").

The year before his death, Robbe-Grillet wrote a novel, Un roman sentimental ("A Sentimental Novel", 2007), based on his own dark sexual fantasies about barely pubescent females. The book was translated into English by D.E. Brooke and published in 2014 by‎ Dalkey Archive Press, being available for purchase online.

Robbe-Grillet's oeuvre is marked by his refusal to comment The translator's preface makes clear that the book contains detailed fictions of progressive sadism and torture, a growing harem of young females, and a pedagogical master/slave intergenerational relationship between the main female character Gigi, and her father. The translator also points out, however,

“In case the reader might imagine that the book is a one note tale of grim horror, it is important to mention that, odd though it may appear, lighter touches do abound. There is tenderness between the girls, as well as in the development of the father-daughter relationship, even as Gigi submits to, or with her father's collusion delivers, gruesome punishments.”

In interviews, Robbe-Grillet stated that he “loved little girls” but had never acted on his fantasies (Shatz, 2014):

"Yes, he had ‘loved little girls’ since he was 12, but he had never acted on his fantasies. In fact he had ‘mastered’ them. And he continued in this half-facetious, half-moralising vein: ‘someone who writes about his perversion is someone who has control over it.’ […]

The virile looks, however, were deceptive, as his wife Catherine discovered. She was the daughter of Armenians from Iran; they met in 1951 in the Gare de Lyon, as they were both boarding a train to Istanbul. He was instantly taken by her. Barely out of her teens, not quite five feet tall and only forty kilos, Catherine Rstakian ‘looked so young then that everyone thought she was still a child’. She inspired in him (as he later wrote) ‘desperate feelings of paternal love – incestuous, needless to say’. […] ‘His fantasies turned obsessively around sadistic domination of (very) young women, by default little girls,’ she wrote in her memoir of their life together, Alain. He gave her ‘drawings of little girls, bloodied’. (‘Reassure yourself, he never transgressed the limits of the law,’ she adds.) […]

From then on, she says, he ‘isolated himself in an ivory tower populated with prepubescent fantasies, in the pursuit, in his “retirement”, of the waking dreams in his Roman sentimental – reveries of a solitary sadist.’ […]

In Les Derniers jours de Corinthe, the second of these romanesques, he wrote that while working in Martinique he had become infatuated with a ‘pink and blonde’ girl who had ‘the air of a bonbon’; Marianne, the 12-year-old daughter of a local magistrate, would sit on his knee, ‘conscious without doubt’ of the effect these ‘lascivious demonstrations’ had on him."

His crime/detecive novel "The Voyeur", first published in French in 1955 and translated into English in 1958, was awarded the Prix des Critiques. According to wikipedia:

"The Voyeur relates the story of Mathias, a traveling watch salesman who returns to the island of his youth with a desperate objective. As with many of his novels, The Voyeur revolves around an apparent murder: throughout the novel, Mathias unfolds a newspaper clipping about the details of a young girl's murder and the discovery of her body among the seaside rocks. Mathias' relationship with a dead girl, possibly that hinted at in the story, is obliquely revealed in the course of the novel so that we are never actually sure if Mathias is a killer or simply a person who fantasizes about killing. Importantly, the "actual murder," if such a thing exists, is absent from the text. The narration contains little dialogue, and an ambiguous timeline of events."

Robbe-Grillet recieved many prestigious appointments and awards during his working life. In addition to the awards he won, he led the Centre for the Sociology of Literature (Centre de sociologie de la littérature) at the Belgian Université Libre de Bruxelles from 1980 to 1988, and from 1971 to 1995, he was a professor at New York University where he lectured on his own novels. Robbe-Grillet was elected to the Académie française (the French Academy) in 2004.