Back Cover copy
Alain Robbe-Grillet is one of the best-known post-war French novelists, the principal theoretician and spokesman of the 'nouveau roman', the most important school of French contemporary fiction that looks at reality in a new subjective way and has changed our conception of the novel.
In Jealousy, Robbe-Grillet's most famous and perhaps his most typical novel, he explores his principal preoccupation, the meaning of reality. The novel is set on a tropical banana plantation and the action is seen through the eyes of a narrator who never appears in person, never speaks and never acts. He is a point of observation, his personality only to be guessed at, watching every movement of the other two characters' actions and events as they flash like moving pictures across the distorting screen of a jealous mind. The result is one of the most important and influential books of our time, a completely integrated masterpiece that has already become a classic.
