To the right of the interior window is a picture of The Thinker that he bought at the Musee Rodin in Paris.
Directly in front of him is a picture of the original dust cover of The Great Gatsby. To the left of the Gaudi is a watercolor of the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. Below them rests two gray speckled office chairs for visitors to sit in. On the wall to the right of the window overlooking the lawn and Wyatt Earp Blvd is a diploma from the University of Arizona for a Bachelor of Arts.
Over the window is a photo of a panoramic view of the Grand Canyon. The blinds over the window are brown wicker, folding Roman style when raised or lowered. The window ledge is dusty, the crispy body of a dead fly hangs in the ragged remains of a spider web. To the left of the window is a three foot slender picture of the Eiffel Tower.
On the wall behind him is a Van Gogh of the wheat fields. Below that is a portrait that an artist friend sketched of his face. To right of the sketch, half obscured by a pile of books on a long gray file cabinet, is a signed photo of the baseball player George Brett.
Two more black filing cabinets butt up against the long gray filing cabinet. He uses his fingers to tap the keys to enter his security code into the computer. He reaches out with his left hand and grasps the handle of the sword letter opener and plunges it into his throat. The pain is intense more than he could have imagined. He pulls the letter opener from his neck with shaking hands and lays it next to his phone.
Blood gushes out on his keyboard and splashes the phone and the silver tin of paperclips. His cheek is on the keyboard and he can feel the heat of the computer circuitry on his skin and the whirl of the fan makes a soft echo in his ear as he I had to kill myself. This is a mind numbing way to write. Very difficult actually to strain out all speculative thoughts by the protagonist, only writing what he can see, and eliminating emotional responses.
Recording everything one does and the way we do it was interesting because I hadn't really thought about how many motions are necessary just to get me the six miles from my house to my office. An arm remains half raised, a mouth gapes, a head is tipped back; but tension has replaced movement, the features are contorted, the limbs stiffened, the smile has become a grimace, the impulse has lost its intention and its meaning, There no longer remains, in their place, anything but excess, and strangenness, and death.
It seems to be a simple plot of a soldier in a city on a mission to deliver a package to a street that he has forgotten the name of, still one would think the inhabitants could set him on a proper course. From a creepy little boy that shadows him, leads him, abandons him to a series of women and soldiers who offer him directions and advice that lead him nowhere. While on his quest he is shot by soldiers on a motorcycle. There is certainly a Kafkaesque feel to the novel reinforced by a sense that their are too many obstacles to fulfill this simple obligation.
I actually liked Jealousy better, so I would suggest reading that story if you want a taste of the style of Alain Robbe-Grillet.
View all 15 comments. Sep 28, Scribble Orca rated it it was amazing Recommended to Scribble by: Excellent translation; close attention and flawless as the Observer observed rendering of Robbe-Grillet's aesthetics and aims: Poundian repetition, the leitmotif of a labyrinth depicted in the glance of the camera and the selected metaphors, surreal landscapes in sepia tones colours used are mostly associated with uniforms creating a dream sense, the development of the speakerless no omniscient author intrusion narrative here not perfectly realised, but evident as intent via the paradoxi Excellent translation; close attention and flawless as the Observer observed rendering of Robbe-Grillet's aesthetics and aims: Poundian repetition, the leitmotif of a labyrinth depicted in the glance of the camera and the selected metaphors, surreal landscapes in sepia tones colours used are mostly associated with uniforms creating a dream sense, the development of the speakerless no omniscient author intrusion narrative here not perfectly realised, but evident as intent via the paradoxical use of present tenses the I-narrator appears only at the beginning and end of the book , the disorientation of the reader and the precision of detail the latter eventually gobbling patience.
View all 7 comments. Feb 25, Drew rated it liked it Shelves: The best way I can describe In The Labyrinth is by saying that reading it is like trying to read a Klein bottle. Or an Escher drawing. And that's both good and bad in every way you'd expect it to be. It takes a good long time to figure out precisely what's going on not that you can ever be exactly sure and the prose or the translation is uninspiring. There's a lot of what seems like unnecessary description of physical objects and locations, to the exclusion of descriptions of, say, the main The best way I can describe In The Labyrinth is by saying that reading it is like trying to read a Klein bottle.
There's a lot of what seems like unnecessary description of physical objects and locations, to the exclusion of descriptions of, say, the main character. Nobody has names; physical descriptions, such as they are, seem meant to confuse. The plot consists of a soldier with a package to deliver from whom? Every intersection looks the same to him. He does occasionally meet people, who rarely tell him anything useful, which raises the question: But all these annoying things pretty much have to be present for the novel to work, which it does probably better than I'm implying here; it's just not really my thing.
Those same irritating descriptions of physical objects pile up to create a tone one could describe as "proto-Lynchian," if one were so inclined. There are heavy red curtains, everything's dusty. Nobody ever seems to have their lights on, so whenever the soldier has a door open for him it's always into complete darkness. Nobody's ever in the streets except this weird little kid who's supposed to guide the soldier but keeps abandoning him. One thing that's interesting, but also frustrating, is that Robbe-Grillet never bothers to get in the heads of his characters.
This is apparently because of his rejection of the "psychological novel. Frustrating for the first half, interesting for the second. Would I recommend it? Maybe to someone who already likes all things French. But I'm not sure I know any of those people. De todos modos, se puede recolectar un argumento que sufre variaciones y es, por lo tanto, bastante fragmentario. Hay un soldado, hay un paquete, hay una calle que encontrar. O tal vez lo tengan. En el laberinto marea, rompe esquemas, cambia de escenarios abruptamente, de voces, oculta todo lo que uno quiere descubrir mientras lee.
Puede llegar a ser frustrante muchas veces. No me cruzo habitualmente con libros como estos y me dieron ganas de que fuera diferente.
Nov 30, Jeff rated it really liked it Recommends it for: I don't blame anyone for disliking this book. There are a lot of things reasonably expectable from novels and stories in general; most of those things seem to be or actually are missing. A simplistic plot less summary. Events are told and things are described.
Raymond Roussel - Monoskop
Most everything involves a soldier carrying a box. He jumpcuts from nexus to nexus within a city with plenty of buildings but without landmarks. This must be shown on a screen. Or sto I don't blame anyone for disliking this book. Or stop motion photography. Cards with the dialog written. It will be easy for me because there are no people moving about the streets with the soldier. A boy with a cape. A man with a fur-lined coat and an umbrella. One at a time with the soldier. I can draw that.
But the many soldiers. It's an etching, the eye ingests the patrons, bartender, and waitress within one. All sleeping within one army barracks hospital room. A sort of family unit inside one residential one-room residence. The soldier might be injured, sick, or simply unable to experience time. I'm thinking of the narrator. It's snowing and he has a sallow complexion with a certain amount of days' beard growth. Silent snowfall, even vocalizations, called speech, might not be auditory. It's all his thoughts. The tree falls inside a skull.
I can tell you that. No one hears a thing. Read images of vision. I stopped summarizing some time ago. So why did i care enough to read the whole book? I know that nothing within the three intro essays felt applicable to my reading experience. Did i like the book, though? Maybe" is what i'd attempted to utter when i was the motionless ARG character inside me. But i think i was am merely the a narrator. Fitting the pieces of narrative and description together within me, as i encountered them, satisfied me.
In a stretchy synaptic tingling kind of way. Though Robbe-Grillet ain't evil for having an alien mind or a concept of The Novel that challenges mine, if there's a war to determine the fate of The Novel, i wouldn't be able to knowingly kill him and i wouldn't want to fight beside him in the trenches either.
Oct 31, Conrado rated it it was amazing. Sep 05, Mona marked it as cant-remember-if-i-read-this-or-not. Read this ages ago. Don't remember much about it, except that it was very haunting. A strange experimental read that feels like a half-forgotten memory. You wander down the same streets, pass the same houses, in search of a meeting spot you cannot remember the name of for a purpose you can no longer recall. The snow falls, doors creak open and lights are turned out.
A challenge in the beginning, but well worth the read. Sep 11, Ayeh rated it it was amazing. Oct 07, V rated it really liked it. Dizzying and often beautiful, more accessible on first reading than Jealousy, but maybe that's because I read Jealousy first. Some unforgettable scenes people behind a curtain in a high window and haunting portrayal of paranoia, suspicion, and perpetual search for identity, selfness, and the truth as it is.
IMO, reading for the imagery itself is enough for the first time. Jul 06, James Ryan rated it really liked it Shelves: This is a marvelous romp between an author and his many attempts to create a narrative before finally abandoning the attempt.
Another twist of the 'nouveau roman' from one of its inceptors. Robbe-Grillet builds high tension line-by-line that carries the reader along, nervously awaiting a new development or insight into the evolving story line. The main marker of any timeline indicated here is in the symbol of the soldier's facial hair growth - a very clever trope. Mar 04, Jessica rated it liked it. It was a very slow start, in which the reader as well as the main character meanders about the labyrinth of a city in which all the street names sound the same and all the intersections, all the buildings, all the lampposts, all the women, and all the boys look alike.
Even all of the soldiers are interchangeable, since no one is carrying papers or wearing their division's numbers anymore. Once we are all thoroughly lost, suddenly the monotonous repetition stops. There is forwa It was a very slow start, in which the reader as well as the main character meanders about the labyrinth of a city in which all the street names sound the same and all the intersections, all the buildings, all the lampposts, all the women, and all the boys look alike.
There is forward progression. We start getting answers, just as our main character does himself. For all of Robbe-Grillet's resistance to reader expectations and the traditional novel, the book still ties up all loose ends and reaches a distinct END. And a novel can go no other way but forward, even if it circles and jumps around and around in time as it goes, since we still read from cover to cover and thus from its beginning to its end.
Our experience of the book as readers is, perhaps, the real story. I loved the moments when Robbe-Grillet did his thing and only described what transpires, what one says, and what is, as in Hemingway, and yet there is emotion evident there all the same. But here, it is a book full of snapshots, like a photo album, more than of moving scenes. It is aware of film, as everything is since "moving pictures" changed our world, and yet it seems to fit more with the early years of film -- the early years of silent film, even.
It is like Chris Marker's film LA JETEE, which consists mostly of still images -- but motion, fleeting, seemingly illusory as it, after all, truly is in film , sneaks in for just a few moments. One might argue that this entire book is in fact about one scene, one drawing, one artificially frozen moment, with motion merely implied, with everything that led to that moment and everything that will follow it implied therein as well -- and with death implied everywhere, since as soon as one captures an image, all that was in it is already, forever, gone.
Apr 26, Hamish rated it really liked it Shelves: Robbe-Grillet uses the same technique here as in Jealousy. Most of the novel is taken up by exacting, detailed descriptions of various physical objects in the main characters' vicinity, rapidly and with no indication shifting back and forth in chronological time.
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So rather than giving a strict narrative, the reader has to infer one from these descriptions, which is a bit easier than it sounds, but still requires very active reading. It's a very unique narrative technique, and one that on the s Robbe-Grillet uses the same technique here as in Jealousy. It's a very unique narrative technique, and one that on the surface sounds kind of gimmicky, but in practice is really effective in giving a sense of confusion and dread.
Though unlike Jealousy, a more traditional narrative emerges to a certain extent as the novel progresses, but it still doesn't quite spell things out for you until the final two chapters. I was actually a little disappointed in those chapters; I preferred the sense of confusion, and when Robbe-Grillet got more explicit it almost felt like he was cheating me of the chance to figure things together for myself.
But he doesn't explain everything, and I want to read it again to try and piece together all the seemingly incompatible parts he left us with.
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Almost every character and location and object seems to have a double somewhere in the novel, and it's never quite clear what's a coincidence and what's an invention of the dying mind of our feverish protagonist. Better than a three but not quite a 4. It took a little while to get in to it as it is repetitive and there's no traditional plot.
It was very much mood driven and about conveying a feeling, which I think does very well once you get in to it. Don't exactly know how you would classify it or the exact nuances for differentiating classification, but this work is something like dada, surrealist, or existentialist, i. Jul 20, Jen Well-Steered rated it really liked it Shelves: Oct 09, Geoff Sebesta rated it it was ok. I read the Howard translation, I understand there are major differences between translators here. Extremely dull, but I guess that's the point. I can't discuss the ending without giving it away, because to a modern reader the ending is quite obvious about a third of the way through.
I wouldn't bother with this book, unless you want to understand PTSD or read incredibly intricate descriptions of wallpaper. Jun 02, David rated it liked it. Read as a breather to my Simenon-fest. Robbe-Grillet is always mystifying and he really creates some vivid images here.
In the Labyrinth
Seems concerned with the position of objects and flow and order. It is a mystery with no crime and no detective. Lucky for me the person who previously owned this copy figured it all out and wrote the five-word solution on the last page. I shall use my Ouija board to interface with the specter of Chief Inspector R-G immediately and report the findings. However, he remained distinct from the last two on this list because of his refusal of anything supernatural, which he replaced by the absolute value of invention, set in a theatrical universe constructed by a chain of enigmas, the solutions of which were always impeccably logical.
Even if he was only to become aware of the fact late in his life, during his lifetime Roussel attracted a great deal of enthusiasm among a generation of artists and poets. It was one of the performances of Impressions of Africa in that Marcel Duchamp , who was there with Guillaume Apollinaire and Francis Picabia, was to recall and mention as a primary influence on his Large Glass. Philippe Soupault, Paul Eluard and Roger Vitrac then took up his defence in Dada and then Surrealist reviews, seeing him as an equivalent of Douanier Rousseau, or comparing the park in Locus Solus to the deserted esplanades of Giorgio de Chirico.
In this text, Roussel sacrificed the transparency of his writing for a principle of permanent digression. Probably with a view to finding a system that would simplify reading it, and point to an order in the intertwining of narrative threads, Roussel opted for a typographical device, cutting up his text with brackets nestled in layers. Readings and interpretations of Roussel have changed enormously over the past century, and the figure of this writer, who throughout his life guarded against revealing the slightest information about himself and kept an air of mystery around the genesis of his works, has become an essential model of the artist, standing as the Minotaur at the centre of the labyrinth of his work.
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