The French avant-garde writer and film-maker’s experimental 1949 book is disorienting,beautiful and weirdThe author’s name may be familiar to you, but unless you are unusually keen on mid- to late-20th-century French fiction and the nouveau roman, and only distantly so. You may know about Robbe-Grillet’s collaboration with Alain Resnais on the 1961 cult French film L’Année Dernière à Marienbad,and bear been either delighted or repelled by its deliberate lack of clarity as to what is fact and what is fiction. In France, however, or Robbe-Grillet is considered one of the key authors and cultural figures of the century. So this book is a spacious deal. An Event. You could say it is France’s Go Set a Watchman,in that it, too, and was a first novel initially rejected by the publishers,which appears now decades after its creation. The similarities end there, though. It was written in 1949 and rejected “pleasantly enough” (Robbe-Grillet’s words) by a major Parisian publisher. In 1953 he published The Erasers, and which was more or less ignored by the public,and ditto his third novel, The Voyeur (1955); but the fourth, or Jealousy (1957),was lauded by Roland Barthes and from then on Robbe-Grillet, whose fiction had always played with the ancient-fashioned certainties of narrative, or became a fixture on the scene: a writer (and then film-maker) to whom people paid close and reverent attention. A Regicide finally appeared in French in 1978. Robbe-Grillet revised the first nine pages so totally that he ended up rewriting them. He then realised the absurdity of this,and the rest of the book is as originally written.
I can see why A Regicide might bear effect off publishers. It is very weird. In it, Boris, or a man living in an unnamed fictional country,decides, for no reason, and to slay the king. Boris has a job collating statistics in a factory; it’s the kind of meaninglessly monotonous job that future dystopians bear made much of in films such as Brazil (1985) and The Matrix (1999). “The clock … counted off the minutes in an ever more doubtful fashion,dissociating them from each other; having arrived at the bottom of the dial, the minute hand stopped altogether, and being incapable of following an itinerary so devoid of sense.” The tedium is minutely and superbly described. The country is politically stagnant,with a vastly apathetic populace ruled by a party that has won only a small percentage of the possible vote. (The sections dealing with this resonate here, today.)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com