Recommendations
Books Like Les Gommes by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Novels that dismantle plot, psychology, and the omniscient author
Les Gommes launched the nouveau roman by stripping the detective novel of everything that makes it a detective novel — leaving only surfaces, objects, and a rigorous refusal of meaning. These novels share that same formal austerity.
- 1
Buy on AmazonLa Jalousie
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Robbe-Grillet's masterpiece — a jealous husband narrates his wife's behavior with obsessive geometric precision, never acknowledging his own presence in the narrative
- 2Buy on Amazon
Tropismes
by Nathalie Sarraute
The other founding text of the nouveau roman — prose pieces that observe the barely perceptible psychological movements beneath bourgeois social surfaces
- 3
Buy on AmazonLa Modification
by Michel Butor
A Prix Renaudot novel in the second person — a man on a train who changes his mind — the most accessible formal experiment of the movement
- 4
Buy on AmazonLa Route des Flandres
by Claude Simon
The Nobel Prize masterpiece of the nouveau roman — the May 1940 military collapse in Faulknerian sentences that hold multiple time planes simultaneously
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Unnamable
by Samuel Beckett
Beckett's radical dismantling of narrative — a voice that cannot stop, cannot be silent, cannot locate itself; the Anglo-Irish parallel to the French nouveau roman
- 6
Buy on AmazonMurphy
by Samuel Beckett
Beckett's early novel — the satirical philosophical comedy before the radical late style; the shared nouveau roman project of evacuating conventional fictional values
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Erasers
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The English translation of Les Gommes — for readers approaching the novel in English, the translation is very good and fully conveys the formal program
- 8
Buy on AmazonModerato cantabile
by Marguerite Duras
Eight elliptical scenes circling a crime of passion — Duras's spare, repetitive, haunting prose in its first fully realized form alongside Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute
More Les Gommes by Alain Robbe-Grillet Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.