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")[1], 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).[2] 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. 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."[3]