The Voyeur

By Alain Robbe-Grillet

Mathias, a timorous, ineffectual traveling salesman, returns to the island of his birth after a long absence. Two days later, a thirteen-year-old girl is found drowned and mutilated. With eerie precision, Robbe-Grillet puts us at the scene of the crime and takes us inside Mathias’s mind, artfully enlisting us as detective hot on the trail of a homocidal maniac. A triumphant display of the techniques of the new novel,” The Voyeur achieves the impossible feat of keeping us utterly engrossed in the mystery of the child’s murder while systematically raising doubts about whether it really occurred.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Release date: Jun 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9780802190567

Reviews for The Voyeur

[poetontheone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Robbe-Grillet crafts a sort of narrative puzzle here, details revealed and suspicions raised and resolved as the story retreads itself and at the same time moves forward. The focus is on objects and on time, instead of direct characterization and plot. I can see the justifications for this, an effort to reinvent the dimensions of the novel and how narrative is constructed. However, I don't empathize with Mathias or the townspeople or, more surprisingly, the dead girl. I find no room to empathize with them because Robbe-Grillet makes them feel more like chess pieces then like people. I can understand his motivation, but characterization and empathy are vital elements to a successful narrative in my opinion. As for this story, we figure out how it unfolds, but not so much why any of it happens.

[matthew.ducmanas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An intricately crafted novel that evokes the same buried dread and mounting tension of a David Lynch movie. The Voyeur develops through a strange sort of dream logic that is absolutely captivating- once acclimated to its experimental structure that explores both narrative structure and the relationship between author/reader/character. Bruce Morrissette from his chapter on the novel in The Novels of Robbe-Grillet:
" [...] in The Voyeur, the author -absent, impersonal, but possessing a special "vision" of the universe he creates- imposes his order on the world of the novel and its objects, only then turning it over to his central character. The latter, in turn, struggles with this "reality," projecting his emotive troubles upon it, changing it or attempting to bring about its destruction. [...] Once introduced into the text, this use of free transitions between present action and memory (or imagination) develops rapidly. The reader learns, through stages of increasing difficulty, to follow the system, to distinguish without intervention on the part of the author between reality, dream, memory, and, finally, paroxysmic vision."*
This book wasn't just an engaging read, but a fascinating reading experience as well.

*The Novels of Robbe-Grillet. Bruce Morrissette. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975. [p.86-88].

[kwohlrob-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Robbe-Grillet's ability to deconstruct time in a story never ceases to amaze me. Upon first reading of the Voyeur, you're thrown by the repetition of the lead character's thoughts. But as the author weaves you back through the ever more familiar scenarios, subtle changes and shifts start to reveal the truth that the character is hiding. One of the more brilliant reinventions of what a novel can be.