[OYS]⋙ PDF Free The Erasers Alain RobbeGrillet Richard Howard 9780802150868 Books

The Erasers Alain RobbeGrillet Richard Howard 9780802150868 Books

Download As PDF : The Erasers Alain RobbeGrillet Richard Howard 9780802150868 Books

The Erasers Alain RobbeGrillet Richard Howard 9780802150868 Books

This book was agonizing to read, every turn of the page inflicted pain on my sensitive green eyes. Robbe-Grillet seems to be going out of his way to write extremely boring, dead prose (think Camus, Flaubert, or Delillo). The characters are flatter than unleavened bread, and the "mystery" i couldn't even bring myself to care about. Objectivity in life and in novels is often as dull as anything. To the devil with the "new novel"!


Tags : The Erasers [Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Howard] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <div>Alain Robbe-Grillet is internationally hailed as the chief spokesman for the noveau roman and one of the great novelists of the twentieth century. The Erasers,Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Howard,The Erasers,Grove Press,0802150861,General,Detective and mystery stories,Murder,Police,FICTION General,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction-Literary,General Adult,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945),Modern fiction

The Erasers Alain RobbeGrillet Richard Howard 9780802150868 Books Reviews

Although his first novel and written when Robbe-Grillet was still quite young, *The Erasers* has most of the stylistic and thematic elements that characterize his later and greater work. Which is to say, *The Erasers* is a good deal more conventional a text than one might expect from one of the leading practitioners and theorists of the "New Novel." What you have here is a novel that reads something like a David Lynch movie--there is a discernible storyline--beginning, middle, and end in the old-school sense--but like a splintered mirror, the shards reflect a picture back upon itself in what seem an infinite number of possible explanatory scenarios.

In *The Erasers* a "special agent" named Wallas arrives in an unnamed town to investigate a murder linked to a series of similar assassinations believed to be carried out by a terrorist group intent on disrupting the nation's political and economic stability. But that's only one theory why Professor Daniel Dupont was shot to death in his study. Another theory is that he committed suicide. Another is that he isn't dead at all since no one--including the cynical local police commissioner--has seen the body, which has supposedly been lost in a labyrinthine bureaucracy. What witnesses exist are entirely unreliable. Wallas himself apparently looks a good deal like a stranger believed to be the killer. And the city with its frustrating layout of look-a-like streets and canals that seem to duplicate and double-back on each other becomes a maze through which Wallas wanders as exhausted physically as he is mentally.

Robbe-Grillet always a master of atmospheric foreboding provides plenty of it in this "existential" thriller. The story has that disturbing fever-dream quality about it where trivial phrases and incidents repeat themselves so obsessively in contexts and combinations so unexpected that they eventually take on an enigmatic significance that begs for interpretation and eludes it at the same time. Is Wallas really a dupe of the agency he supposedly works for? Does such an agency even exist? Is he the murderer? These are the kinds of questions *The Erasers* forces the reader to ask and you're still asking them after reading the final page. The mystery is too big for one man to figure out; the world cannot be understood ultimately by any single mind even with the "help" of others--there are too many variables, too many unpredictable testimonies, too many hidden agendas, too many "suspects."

Missing the dark, S-M tinged eroticism that would later become his trademark, as well as earn him a certain degree of notoriety, especially in his films, *The Erasers* is not quite as exciting--or as stylistically innovative--as the novels in which Robbe-Grillet fully developed his theories and vision. But it's an interesting avant-garde literary thriller that still retains enough conventional mystery elements to make it enjoyable even for the intelligent, if somewhat less adventuresome, reader.
This trudging narrative unfolds like a slow death in an austere landscape. Creaking, croaking, caliginous, it is instructive only as a model of how to turn the written word into toxic treacle. To be fair, perhaps its decided lack of flow and navigability is a result of translation difficulties, idiomatic expressions without clear cross-cultural parallels. Though it becomes clear upon reading this exercise in pain it is more due to authorial intent and preoccupation. As an example of the nouveau roman style of writing for which Robbe-Grillet militated this work embodies the doctrine he espoused; in regard to the novel he argued against "several obsolete notions" such as character, story and depth. To this end he has succeeded ten-fold. The Erasers is replete with repetitive banal prose while expressly lacking in the obsolete notions of character, story and depth. If your desire is to write prose that will compel the world to bare its fangs in seething repulsion while hurling jagged stones at you, let this novel be your guide. As an anti-story tutorial this work is priceless.
Loved it.
The Erasers is one of the most convoluted, complex, knotty novels a reader could possibly encounter, a novel that can be approached from multiple perspectives and on multiple levels, everything from an intricate detective mystery to a meditation on the circularity of time, from the phenomenology of perception to the story of Oedipus, to name several. For the purpose of this review, I will focus on one aspect of The Erasers I have not seen from scholars, literary critics or reviewers - the prevalence of ugliness in the city where the novel is set.

With its winding streets and system of canals, the novel's city has been likened to Amsterdam, but any likeness to this beautiful, charming Dutch city ends there. The cold Northern European industrial city we encounter in The Erasers is ugly and creepy, lacking any trace of charm or warmth. The main character, special agent Wallas, who travels to the city to solve a murder, repeatedly reflects on this lack of aesthetic attraction and beauty. For example, we read, " . . . a city completely barren of appeal for an art lover . . . ", and then again, " . . . a huge stone building ornamented with scrolls and scallops, fortunately few in number - in short, of rather somber ugliness." From Wallas's multiple observations, this unnamed city's stark ugliness brings to my mind Golconda by the surrealist Rene Magritte, a painting of a cityscape raining men in black suits and bowlers, painted in the same year as the publication of The Erasers.

This unattractiveness also extends to the people inhabiting the city. Two men described in some detail are both fat and flabby and move in a stiff and mechanical way first, the manager of the café, portrayed as follows "A fat man is standing here, the manager . . . greenish, his features blurred, liverish, and fleshy in his aquarium.", and second, Laurent, the chief commissioner "He is a short, plump man with a pink face and a bald skull . . . his overfed body shakes from fits of laughter."

Tom, one of the condemned prisoners, from Jean-Paul Sartre's story The Wall is such a flabby, fat man. Also, Antoine Roquentin, the main character in Sartre's novel Nausea, describes shaking hands with another fat man "Then there was his hand like a fat white worm in my own hand. I dropped it almost immediately and the arm fell back flabbily."

So, why do I highlight this? Because I have the sense both Robbe-Grillet and Sartre (who had a great influence on Robbe-Grillet) saw flab and fat as repulsive and ugly, a counter to the possibility of freedom and spontaneity and fluidity we can experience in our human embodiment.

In contradistinction, Wallas is a tall, calm young man with regular features and who walks with an elastic, confident gate. But at every turn Wallas encounters ugliness, even in an automat where there is a sign reading `Please Hurry. Thank you', And this sign is repeated many times on the white walls of the automat. How nauseating! Not surprisingly, Wallas eats too fast, resulting in an upset stomach. Shortly thereafter he returns to a familiar dirty café and he continues to feel ill.

Here are few more direct quotes on what Wallas sees in this city
* "Mouth open, the man is staring into space, one elbow on the table propping up his bloated head."
* "Once again, Wallas is walking toward the bridge. Ahead of him, under a snowy sky, extends the Rue de Brabant - and its grim housefronts."
* "From another angle, the man assumes an almost coarse expression that has something vulgar, self-satisfied, rather repugnant about it."

True, Wallas encounters one saleswoman who is upbeat and slightly provocative, but the other people he encounters, to the extent these men and woman are described, are drab and shabby and decidedly unattractive. An entire city of unsightly sights and repellent people. Is it too much of a stretch to interpret the pistol Wallas shoots at the end of the novel as, in part, a reaction to overbearing ugliness? Perhaps in the same way the pistol shots in Albert Camus's The Stranger (a work Alain Robbe-Grillet counts as one of his prime influences) are a reaction to the searing heat and glare from the sun and the young Arab's knife blade?

Rather than providing a definitive answer, this raises another question Are we as readers so coarse and dull and deadened by the modern mechanized world that we accept the ugly as the norm? Does this acceptance account for the fact that all the essays and reviews I have read on this novel do not draw attention to the ugliness Wallas confronts?
It's one of the best detective stories ever written but not for the careless reader. Read it with care twice and you'll see there are NO plot holes. On first reading nothing but plot holes. And - this not a spoiler - every detail is a clue, so pay attention.
This book was agonizing to read, every turn of the page inflicted pain on my sensitive green eyes. Robbe-Grillet seems to be going out of his way to write extremely boring, dead prose (think Camus, Flaubert, or Delillo). The characters are flatter than unleavened bread, and the "mystery" i couldn't even bring myself to care about. Objectivity in life and in novels is often as dull as anything. To the devil with the "new novel"!