Robbe-Grillet is a visual novelist for whom perception is intrinsically fascinating but fraught with uncertainty.
The Daily Telegraph
Robbe-Grillet's career was built on a sly and amusing paradox: of using fiction over and over again to undo the conventions of fiction. But how cleverly and engagingly he did it.
The Independent
The finest novel about love since Proust.
- Vladimir Nabokov,
The novel remains striking in its originality, and Richard Howard’s translation from 1959 has held up well.
TLS
In his most famous and perhaps most typical work, Robbe-Grillet explores his principal preoccupation: the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation, and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in person, never speaks and never acts. He is a point of observation, his personality only to be guessed at, watching every movement of the other characters’ actions as they flash like moving pictures across the distorting screen of a jealous mind.
The result is one of the most important and influential books of our time, a completely integrated masterpiece that has already become a classic.