PARIS — The Associated Press Published on Monday, Feb. 18, 2008 1:13PM EST Last updated on Monday, Mar. 30, 2009 3:03PM EDT
Alain Robbe-Grillet, a “new novelist” and filmmaker who rejected conventional storytelling and was one of France's most important avant-garde writers, died Monday, hospital officials said. He was 85.
Robbe-Grillet was admitted to the Caen University Hospital in western France over the weekend for cardiac problems, officials said. He died there Monday morning.
Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplays for such films as Last Year at Marienbad (1961) with Alain Resnais, and directed L'Immortelle (The Immortal) (1963), Trans-Europ-Express (1967) and Eden and After (1970).
He was the most prominent of France's “new novelists,” a group that emerged in the mid-1950s and whose experimental works tossed aside traditional literary conventions such as plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation. Others included Claude Simon, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute.
Robbe-Grillet was inducted into France's Légion d'honneur, and was one of the 40 so-called “immortals” of the prestigious Académie Française, the anointed protector of the French language.
President Nicolas Sarkozy's office described Robbe-Grillet as “equally at ease in the expression of his most intimate fantasies as in the lucid and dispassionate analysis of concepts.”
“The Académie Française today loses one of its most illustrious members, and without a doubt its most rebellious,” his office said in a statement.
Robbe-Grillet's best-known works of fiction include Les Gommes (The Erasers), a 1953 novel about a detective investigating an apparent murder but who ends up killing the victim, and Le Voyeur, about the world seen through the eyes of a sadistic killer.
In 1963, he wrote Pour Un Nouveau Roman, (Toward a New Novel) a highly touted critical essay laying the theoretical foundations of the “new novel.” The work became the French avant-garde's bible, and catapulted Robbe-Grillet to star status among Parisian Left Bank intellectuals.
Robbe-Grillet was born in the western town of Brest, the son of an engineer. He graduated from the prestigious Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris and received a degree in agricultural engineering from the National Agronomy Institute.
His survivors and funeral plans were not immediately available.
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