A review by ralowe
Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet

3.0

at the end of the day it's still going to be a plantation, so what else do you really need to know? but the veranda, the column, the place-settings, the trapezoidal arrangements of the rows of banana trees, the crickets: this is where it's at. i can play with the notion that anticolonial resources reside here, notwithstanding the author's aptitude for unveiling for the sake of greater anthropological efficiency all our inquiries into "the singsong voice of the Negroes, which detaches certain syllables by emphasizing them too much, sometimes in the middle of words."ќ (pg. 59). this is ficiont iwth no protagonist, no three act structure. or are all these things implied? is one to infer through the schema of properties a narrative for the eponymous property-related emotion? i think you get the most out of the scenery and its minutae as presented by alain robbe-grillet by not thinking about "jealousy"ќ while reading *jealousy*. did oulipo and the other french ambigramic movements (oupolpot, ougrapo, etc) felt there was nothing more to tell since we are all the subject supposed to know already, leaving nothing for the griot to impart, no moral, no ethical demonstration, just luxuriate in the all-consumingly assaultive sensorium. or are all the landscaping details an object lesson for the bourgeosie upon the menial and banal lifeworlds of servitude. why would you want to read a novel about detailing the tasks of your shitty job? something happens, i think, but the description jumps around, is partial, and intentionally distracts from the motivations of the figures depicted (not characters). everything is surface, and i did think of heather love. is this ethical representation? why write about people who run a plantation anyway? this novel also made me think of claire denis' masterful film *white material*, and i wonder how much robbe-grillet's art is informed by neo-realist cinema.