French novelist, screenwriter and director. First trained as an agricultural engineer, he turned to writing and became a leading figure in the new school of French letters. He presents the concept that the physical world is the only true reality and that perception must come through the physical experience and not through consciousness. He is considered the originator of the French “new novel” in which the story is subordinated to structure and the significance of external reality is stressed over psychological motivation or plot development.
Alain Robbe-Grillet was born of immigrant parents from the Jura. His father, Gaston Robbe-Grillet, was an engineer. His mother was Yvonne (Canu) Robbe-Grillet. He attended Lycées de Brest, Lycées Buffon and St. Louis. During World War II he was deported to work in a German tank factory. In 1944 he received a diploma from the National Institute of Agronomy. From 1945 to 1951 he studied at the National Statistical Institute in Paris and the Institute of Colonial Fruits and Crops. He has worked as an agronomist, and since 1955 as a literary consultant at a publishing house, Les Editions de Minuit, which publishes his own books as well as those of other several others associated with the “nouveau roman.”
“The Erasers,” 1953, was his first novel, featuring an ingenious transposition of the Oedipus myth into the framework of a modern detective story. Critical attention has focused particularly on Grillet’s obsessively detailed and mathematically precise description of things. “The Voyeur,” 1955, illustrates his preoccupation with psychosadism. “Jealousy,” 1957, is the most famous of this genre from the 1950s. “La Maison de Rendez-vous,” 1965, used several contradictory points of view.
Robbe-Grillet’s emphasis on visuals led him to writing and directing films in the 1960s. The most famous dramatization of his literary theories is his screenplay for “Last Year at Mariebad,” 1962.
In 1984 he published “Ghosts in the Mirror,” the first of an autobiographical trilogy, “Romanesques.” His later works reflect the belief of Claude Simon that “everything is autobiographical, even the imaginary.”
The writer/film maker died on February 18, 2008 at age 85 in a Caen, France hospital. He had been hospitalized a few days earlier for a cardiac problem.
Link to Wikipedia biography