I love Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu1). It's a monumental work, which I'm not going to attempt to summarise here, set in late 19th & early 20th century France, largely within the milieu of the Parisian upper classes, dealing primarily with time and memory but also adolescence, … Continue reading A month of not reading Proust
Earlier this year I happened across the 1980 Asterix annual in a charity shop; a book whose existence I was entirely unaware of. It was evidently a one-off, and provides an introduction to many of the long-running French comic series’ characters, along with heavily abridged versions of some of the stories, and the usual puzzles … Continue reading Asterix!
The Nouveau Roman was a French Modernist literary movement of the 1950s whose antecedents were Joyce, Beckett and Proust. A common theme among the works produced by those writers grouped as nouveax romanistes were "discontinuity, rupture, difference and revolution"¹, and they defined themselves against "a dominant culture in thrall to a staid and anachronistic concept … Continue reading The “Nouveau Roman”: where to start?
In this final part of my study of Robbe-Grillet's early fiction, with today being what would have been his 95th birthday, I'll look at the novel which, for me, sees him reach the high-point of the nouveau-roman; and a series of experimental (in the true sense of the word) short fictions. By the time of … Continue reading Alain Robbe-Grillet: early fiction (part 3)
Into the Gyre 