La Jalousie Reading Order

La Jalousie (Jealousy, 1957) by Alain Robbe-Grillet is widely regarded as the masterpiece of the Nouveau Roman — the novel in which the formal method Robbe-Grillet had been developing in Les Gommes and Le Voyeur achieved its most complete and most disturbing expression. The narrator is a plantation owner in a tropical colony, watching his wife A. and her friend Franck with the obsessive, characteristically Robbe-Grillet precision. The narrator is never named, never described, never given a first-person position within the text — his presence is inferred entirely from the geometry of his watching: the field of vision from the veranda, the angle of the window, the position from which the banana plantation is visible. The word 'jalousie' in French means both jealousy and a Venetian blind (a slatted shutter), and the novel works on both meanings simultaneously: the narrator watches through the slats of the jealousy/jalousie, and his watching is the form his jealousy takes. Whether A. and Franck are actually having an affair is never established — the novel gives us only the repeated descriptions of the same scenes (the veranda, the dinner table, the centipede, the letter) from slightly different angles, the obsessive recurrence of the suspicious details and the unreliability of the perspective that presents them. La Jalousie is the Nouveau Roman novel that most directly influenced subsequent literature and film.