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 “New Novel.”

Jealousy was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “a technical masterpiece, impeccably contrived,” while leading French critic Maurice Nadeau wrote that “In the Labyrinth is better than an excellent novel: it is a great work of literature.” In America the “Parade of Books” column proclaimed that “Robbe-Grillet will take his place in world literature as a successor of Balzac and Proust.”

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.