Alain Robbe-Grillet's Préface à une vie d'écrivain published by Seuil

At over eighty years old, Alain Robbe-Grillet has not reached the end of his writing life. Since 2001, with the simultaneous publication of La Reprise and Le Voyageur, he has intensified his creative output, now including Préface à une vie d'écrivain (Seuil, coll. “Fiction & Cie”), Scénarios en rose et noir (Fayard), and a new film in progress. The book is a CD and transcript of a 2003 France-Culture series by Bernard Comment, offering a retrospective of Robbe-Grillet's life as a writer. He revisits his famous 1977 declaration “Je n’ai jamais parlé d’autre chose que de moi” from Le Miroir qui revient, which upended Nouveau Roman orthodoxy. The work navigates his own oeuvre—especially La Reprise—and those of predecessors (Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka) and contemporaries (Nabokov, Sartre, Camus, Simon, Duras, Pinget, Antonioni, Buñuel), as well as poets Mallarmé, Valéry, and Breton. Robbe-Grillet articulates a clear theory of literary modernity, opposing reassuring popularization. He defines himself as a “professeur de plaisir” and a master of “intranquillité,” whose ironic method unsettles all certainties. His work, born from ruins and disaster, embraces a “principe d'incertitude” that demands constant reconstruction. The book is recommended for anyone engaging with contemporary novelistic questions.