Word: grillet
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...VOYEUR, by Alain Robbe-Grillet (219 pp.; Grove; clothbound, $3.50; paperback, $1.75), is based on the author's notion that "the world is neither significant nor absurd. It is. That is the most remarkable thing about it." Proceeding from this Istentialist view, Author Robbe-Grillet, hero of Europe's avant-garde critics, has written a sort of whodunit in which the question of whodunit is never answered. To a French offshore island comes Mathias, a watch salesman. Little is told about him, but it is soon plain that he is close to insanity and that his special aberration...
...Voyeur is a savage but pointless reaction against the psychological novel. Instead of probing the mind, the book nearly ignores it, and concentrates on the exact description of things. In accordance with Author Robbe-Grillet's belief that objects are more important than people. The island, a barroom, a bedroom, are etched into the reader's mind, while the story itself and the characters are allowed to go hang. Sooner or later, Robbe-Grillet or one of his disciples is bound to write a novel about a roomful of furniture; the affair between the armchair and the ottoman...
...Sarraute, the Russian-born wife of a Paris lawyer, has been acclaimed a leader of a group called the New Realists, who urge a new kind of objectivity, which is at once both more detached and more intense. "In this future universe of the novel," says Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, the group's titular leader, "gestures and objects will be 'there,' before being 'something'; and they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own meaning . . . No longer will objects be merely vague reflections of the hero's vague soul...