Book 71 - Alain Robbe-Grille "Jealousy"

Alain Robbe-Grille "Jealousy" (Calder Publications)




man suspects his wife is having an affair with his neighbor. He searches for proof, for clues, playing the same sequence of events over and over in his mind looking for signs. When did it begin? Do they suspect he knows? How far will the affair go?

Alain Robbe-Grillet's short novel, Jealousy, covers familiar territory-- a married woman's indiscretion with her married neighbor. But Mr. Robbe-Grillet broke new ground, or I should say broke new ground when he wrote Jealousy in 1957. Where have the French been hiding him since?

Jealousy is a third-person first-person narrative. All but one of the scenes features the husband and wife entertaining the neighbor who spends time at their house while his own wife stays home sick. But the husband is almost invisible. The third-person narrator never mentions him. Instead, the narrator obsessively reviews what look like unimportant events in a stream-of-consciousness style that perplexes as much as it enlightens.

Try as he might, the narrator cannot find proof of the wife's infidelity. Glances over dinner, pauses in the conversation, and even a night spent together in a hotel does not prove anything. There seem to be no grounds for jealousy. But suspicion lingers. The reader understands that the wife and the neighbor must be up to something. Why keep going over the same set of events if they're not? Soon the reader becomes aware that the third-person narrator is the husband--that the third person is really a first-person narration. Obsessed with his wife's infidelity, the husband has written himself out of the novel as he jealously examines and re-examines how his wife and his neighbor behave.

One night, the neighbor kills a centipede as it crawls up the wall during an uneventful dinner. This event is observed in such detail and so many times from so many angles that the reader soon believes it must mean something. But what? The neighbor and the wife drive into town, a drive of several hours from the banana plantations where they live, and fail to return until the next day claiming bad road conditions prevented night travel. This also must mean something, but again what are we to make of it?

By the end, the experience of reading Jealously becomes the experience of jealousy itself. There is no resolution, no linear plot, and not much in the way of character either. Instead, the novel takes the reader into the emotion. Jealousy is the novel's main character in the end. It serves no purpose, it is not resolved, and it has no single cause nor anything to support its existence except itself. Jealousy gives birth to itself and feeds itself as it grows

Quite an astonishing novella.

Book 72 - Dylan Thomas "Under Milk Wood"

Dylan Thomas "Under Milk Wood" (Everyman)




his was a totally immersive pleasure. I savoured every word - and they're in abundance as they come at you almost without pause for thought or breath in this extended prose poem - 'a play for voices'. The tempo and rhythm match that of a day's span: gentle and deliberate at times, busily frenzied at others. I don't know if this is Thomas' masterpiece as I'm only at the beginning of reading his work, but it must surely have been hard to better. It is a small piece of perfection - short in length but leaving a lasting impression. A day in the life of the backwater seaside town of Llareggub. I should say that it is a fictional town, but that almost seems ungrateful on my part - such is the power and vivid impression of his rendering of that place. It is a place alive with spirit and flavour, sounds and smells, tones and tastes. There are ghosts and poetry, dreams and gossip. Hopes and memories abound. At times I was struck by an almost Chagall-like sense of imagery. There are equal parts tragedy and wonder, as well as the fantastic and the banal; and a fair dollop of fruity humour to boot.

I had the pleasure of listening to the audiobook version remade by the BBC in 2003, featuring the pitch-perfect original recording of Richard Burton as 'First Voice', together with a new all-Welsh cast of many wonderful voices - including Sian Phillips as 'Second Voice'. I've seen the 1970s film adaptation before and I would love to see that again.

This is a play where nothing really happens. It's a slice of life on a quotidian day in a quotidian town. Thomas couches it in poetic language, making the events seem more like magic than mundane, and a chorus narrates through the entire play the events that are unfolding as we eavesdrop, occasionally explaining some detail of life that would otherwise go unremarked. A good read but best heard.