Jealousy

by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Book Overview

The full French text is accompanied by French-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394170318
• ISBN13: 9780394170312
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Stunning and original, dark and mind-warping

When I first read "Jealousy," I had never read anything else like it--because there is nothing else like it. For starters, the book is written in first person, yet it never uses the words I, me, my, mine, we, our, or us, or any other first person posessives. When it's time for dinner, instead of saying, "And now we sit down to eat," the author says something like "And now it is time for dinner," and he describes there being three plates, and mentions two other people eating. Also, the book is incredibly precise in its details. It names every tree in a bananna forest, spends pages describing a woman brushing her hair, and meticulously records where every shadow in every corner of every room falls, to the point that if he hasn't yet described a part of a room, you wonder, "Well, what's in THAT corner?" As a result of this unique perspective, and of the author's close attention to detail, the reader forgets the story is in first person at all, and grows to trust the book as an exact, almost scientific account of everything going on. But, what's going on isn't science--it's an affair. It's the narrator's wife having an affair with a neighbor, in a hot, foreign, plantation-style setting. As the narrator gets more suspicious and prejudiced, so does the reader. As the narrator gets more distrustful and angry, so do you. This book is brilliant--it's French experimentalism at its best. It explores themes of love and identity and jealousy and reality (despite its author claiming he wants the reader not to find any intended symbolism in it, but only to observe it as one would real life). It's antilinear and unconventional, and explores several dark motifs, such as a squashed centipede on a wall that seems more and more violent with every mention, and with every moment passed in the narrator's growing rage and paranoia. At times this book may be hard to read, but it's always worth it, and it's always genius. Buy it, but it, buy it, buy it. Your mind will never be the same again.

Peeking through the blinds

I read Jalousie in college, over 20 years ago, and still think of it with great affection. It is a novel of obsession by an author equally obsessed with technique and perspective, and if you submit to it it is hypnotizing. We pretend, in our 'real lives' to see in three dimensions, and to understand the people around us as well, but jalousie makes the case that we are really very limited in what we actually know -we are like a paranoid man peering at the world through the slats of the blinds that cover our windows: we can only guess the true shape of the world, the actual motivations of people. From this perspective everyone's motives are suspect, and paranoia blooms in the heat of this banana plantation, into madness. My favorite image, recalled 20 years since I have read the work, is the monstrous centipede on the wall: first there, then smashed into the wallpaper, then the stain of its presence, and over and over again. Robbe-Grillet, given your willingness to submit, crawls into your consciousness like this luscious, preposterously large, poisonous insect.

Wow!

Compared to his other works, i did not enjoy it as much. But this is a brilliant writer. Anything he writes overflows with creativity. I recommend this book. But i recommend The Voyeurs or The Erasers first.

Amazing

One of the best and most mysterious novels ever. It is the most psychological of novels because there is no psychology involved in interpreting the events.

Something totally different

This novel goes in a direction very different from other novels that I've read in the past. The characters are never really defined, the narrator never acknowledges his own identity, and there is no linear plot at all. Although it may be interesting to figure out "what really happened," that doesn't seem to be a concern as you're reading. The portrait of jealousy itself is what makes the novel fascinating, and the special connection between the word for "blinds" in French and the word for, well, "jealousy" adds some interesting levels of meaning. This edition is particularly useful for non-native French readers, as it explains the novel in the introduction and also provides a glossary in the back pages.