Alain Robbe-Grillet: L’Aventure du Nouveau Roman

Writing a biography of Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922–2008) today is risky business. First, one could say that there is no real need to write such a work, since few writers have so prolifically and ceaselessly commented upon their own life and work as well as their own successive and sometimes contradictory statements. Besides, the biographical literature on the author is already huge, combining both insider’s testimonies such as the “secret” diary of his wife Catherine and countless outsiders’ judgments and analyses, either firsthand or more speculative. Finally, and this may be the biggest challenge for a contemporary biographer, one might also have the impression that publishing a biography of Robbe-Grillet has become a problem in itself in 2022, since, after having been at the center of all vanguard debates on the novel between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, when the French “New Novel” was ubiquitous (its success in U.S....