inter15.txt.htm -
15 >
literature. I am also very fond of Queneau's Zazie, and
I remember some excellent essays he published in Nouvelle
revue franзaise. We met once at a party and talked about
another famous fillette. I do not care for Butor. But
Robbe-Grillet is so unlike the others. One cannot, one should
not lump them together. By the way, when we visited
Robbe-Grillet, his petite, pretty wife, a young actress, had
dressed herself а la gamine in my honor, pretending to
be Lolita, and she continued the performance the next day, when
we met again at a publisher's luncheon in a restaurant. After
pouring wine for everyone but her, the waiter asked,
"Voulez-vous un Coca-Cola, Mademoiselle? It was very
funny, and Robbe-Grillet, who looks so solemn in his
photographs, roared with laughter.
Someone has called the New Novel "the detective story
taken seriously" (there it is again, the influence of the
French edition of Despair). Parodistic or not, you take
it "seriously, " given the number of times you've transmuted
the properties of the genre. Would you say something about why
you've returned to them so often?
My boyhood passion for the Sherlock Holmes and Father
Brown stories may yield some twisted clue.
You once said l hat Robbe-Grillet's shifts of levels
belong to psychology-- "psychology at its best. "Are you
apsychological novelist?
All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists, T
guess. Speaking of precursors of the New Novel, there is Franz
Hellens, a Belgian, who is very important. Do you know
of him?
No, I don't. When was he active, in which period did he
write? The post-Baudelaire period.
Could you be more specific?