La Jalousie

PUBLISHED IN FRENCH. Jealousy, the old standby in fiction and drama, is the subject of this short French novel set on a banana plantation in the West Indies. Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie treats a traditional situation (husband, wife, outsider) in a fascinating, detective-story-like way. Readers discover as they read what is happening and speculate on how to interpret the incidents related. The whole fascination of the novel lies in the What really happened? It can be raised almost at every page. No two critics ever agree on the answer. Questions, given in French, as notes, serve to alert readers to the significance of certain facts and give them a grasp of the techniques Robbe-Grillet uses. The general introduction, in English, briefly discusses the significance of the “new novel,” Robbe-Grillet’s particular theories, and attempts to place La Jalousie in perspective without giving away clues to the solution of the story, which readers will want to find for themselves.