Obituary: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain Robbe-Grillet passed away yesterday at the age of 85. A major force in twentieth-century French literature, here’s part of the obit in “The Guardian“:

He was the most prominent of France’s “new novelists,” a group that emerged in the mid-1950s and whose experimental works tossed aside traditional literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation. Others included Claude Simon, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute. [. . .]

Read by high school and college students the world over, he enjoyed an international reputation based on the success of his early works.

The Literary Saloon has information about all the early obituaries, and some information about how his passing relates to the current problems of the Académie française.