Posted by Steven
on 17/2/2009, 21:52:18, in reply to "Re: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy - This post contains SPOLIERS"
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I read Jealousy a couple of days ago, but was out of town without Internet so I couldn't join the discussion until now. I really liked it, and I was hoping that you would as well. I'm glad all novels aren't written this way, but it was a fascinating experience. I read Robbe-Grillet's first novel, The Erasers, a few weeks ago and like it as well. It isn't quite as obsessively detailed as Jealousy.
I thought the indirect narration was brilliantly done. Everything is as the husband sees or imagines it, and the entire novel is perhaps his disturbed recollections, randomly arranged and repeated as our thoughts naturally are.
If there is a purpose to the counting of the banana trees, perhaps it is to establish the personality of the husband, since it is his thoughts we are reading. What kind of person would know how many trees he owned, row by row, and mentally review their geometric arrangement? One who is obsessive about his possessions. He is probably excessively controlling, and too much focused on his work. All these would lead to an unhappy marriage and to jealousy.
Another clue is how meticulously he removes the stain from the centipede and, if I remember correctly, attempts to erase the stray marks from a sheet of paper rather than just discard it. He is also very particular about the bridge repair (more on that below). Yet the peeling balustrades remain unpainted. A... wants them to be painted yellow, but the implication is that the husband disagrees, so they remain unpainted. They disagree on something and can't compromise, so it remains undone and annoys him.
I don't have a theory for why the wife is "A..." but Franck isn't "F..."
Regarding the "violence" referenced on the back cover, I had the same reaction as Lale. There is only the one quick and shocking mention of Franck's flaming car wreck. But perhaps this is why the husband/narrator keeps coming back to the images of the men repairing the bridge. Is this where Franck has the wreck, and is it possible that the husband is having this work done, not to repair the road, but to prepare a trap to kill Franck?
In addition to the passages Joffre mentions as possible clues of A's murder, there are also a couple of times where it mentions that A's eyes are open as wide as possible and never blink. And the minute description of the razor blade is portentious of violence as well.
But then why would the husband, after going to such lengths to make Franck's death look like an accident, do something as obvious as cut his wife's throat with a razor? It remains guesswork.