“A Sentimental Novel,” the final published work of the avant-garde novelist and theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet, appeared in France four months before his death, in 2008, and in English translation last spring. The content of the novel contributed to the lag in its translation: “A Sentimental Novel” (reviewed this summer in Briefly Noted) is a compendium of Robbe-Grillet’s sadistic fantasies, which, he said, he had catalogued since adolescence. The work consists of two hundred and thirty-nine numbered paragraphs that form a sort of sadist’s rhapsody about the sexual initiation of a fourteen-year-old girl, Gigi. Gigi’s travails are recounted in exacting detail, against a lushly imagined mise-en-scène, with elaborate furnishings, torture devices, and a proliferation of young companions.
Click here to read the interview at the New Yorker
