Jealousy and In the Labyrinth

Two novels by the pioneering French author and founder of the Nouveau Roman literary movement-with essays by Roland Barthes and others. In Jealousy, a man living on a banana plantation obsessively watches everything around him, from the landscape and insects to his wife's every move. In the Labyrinth follows a an increasingly desperate soldier as he carried a mysterious package through an unknown city. From these deceptively simple premises, Alain Robbe-Grillet produced two of the most effecting and important works of the avant-garde Nouveau Roman, or "e;New Novel."e;Jealousy was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "e;a technical masterpiece, impeccably contrived,"e; while leading French critic Maurice Nadeau wrote that "e;In the Labyrinth is better than an excellent novel: it is a great work of literature."e; In America the "e;Parade of Books"e; column proclaimed that "e;Robbe-Grillet will take his place in world literature as a successor of Balzac and Proust."e;This volume, which offers incisive essays on Robbe-Grillet by Professor Bruce Morrissette of the University of Chicago and by French critics Roland Barthes and Anne Minor, also contains a helpful bibliography of writings by and about the author.