The Voyeur
A best friend's sister erotic romantic comedy

Alain Robbe-Grillet is very careful about details… He describes objects as scrupulously as if he paints a series of still lifes. Memories of the past and the present events are interlaced so smoothly that the sense of reality becomes blurred… When he was still a child – perhaps twenty-five or thirty......more

This was my first experience with the nouveaux romans of Robbe-Grillet, and it's a tough one for me to rate, as I had no idea what was happening half the time. Okay, most of the time. All I know for certain is that a traveling watch salesman returns to his small hometown island in order to sell as m......more

Different mediums handle styles of narrative with more success than others. I think that Robbe-Grillet's style is one such example. I loved the film Last Year at Marienbad, which he wrote the screenplay for. The repetitiveness, the continual focus on the details of the hotel, the surreal dreamlike q......more

Beautifully and very very patiently written, The Voyeur reads like a dark fairy tale for adults (“all great novels are great fairy tales”—Nabokov). The main character, Mathias, is a watch salesman, and his obsessive-compulsive fixation on the minutest details of stuff cripples his ability to sell an......more

A watch salesman returns to the island where he lived as a child, looking to make a few quick sales to old mates. But, typically with Robbe-Grillet, things are not at all clearcut. Events have a habit of repeating themselves with slight variations. Objects are described in sometimes excruciating deta......more