Jealousy
Alain Robbe-Grillet · 1922–2008 · France
Originally La Jalousie (French)
Why it matters
A banana plantation, a possible adultery, and a narrator who is only a watching absence: the same scenes measured obsessively, out of order. The nouveau roman's purest experiment: geometry as anguish.
At a glance
postmodernpsychological novel
Difficulty 8/10slow pace144 pagesObsessive, repetitive description from an unidentified narrator with no clear plot.
Deep dive
Why the husband narrating this book never appears in it — no name, no body, not even a first-person pronoun — and what that grammatical vanishing act does to the question of whether the affair ever happened.
