A Sentimental Novel
Alain Robbe-Grillet
[Dalkey Archive Press]
A Sentimental Novel is the final book of Alain Robbe-Grillet, expounder of the nouveau roman and screenwriter of Last Year At Marienbad. Some might say just as well – it’s hard to know what could follow such a pornographically polyphonic orchestration of the writer’s sickest fantasies. One can almost imagine the author cackling manically all the way to the grave, departing a room leaving an evil smell behind. For evil it is. Here we have children being raped and mutilated almost every second paragraph (out of 239 – they are conveniently numbered). Breasts are sliced off and grilled, iron rods shoved in every aperture. The story charts a professorial father’s efforts to initiate his daughter in every kind of depravity, in a gruesome preparation for their final act of incest.
One’s eyes glaze over at various points as the litany of disgusting horrors often tends towards tedium, and it’s just as well the book is as short as it is, redeemed only by a few isolated moments of unexpected tenderness (just try spotting them amid the prevailing hideousness). The prose is fine, cool, precise and full of lush descriptions of the opulent backdrops against which these misdeeds occur, which only adds to the book’s disturbing power – one’s morals constantly vie with one’s aesthetic admiration. You may be tempted to throw it away in outrage, but there’s no denying it’s a singular swan-song.
Words: Sam Coll
