What do you think?
Rate this book
Topology of a Phantom City
Paperback in acceptable condition. Previous owner has penned and dated FEP. General shelf and handling wear, including creasing and wear to cover, edges and corners, rubbing and light scoring to cover, and small area of surface paper damage to rear. Pageblock is tanned and lightly marked. Within, pages are well bound; occasional blemish noted, however content is clear and bright. CN
144 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
8 people are currently reading
411 people want to read
About the author
Alain Robbe-Grillet
102 books432 followersScreenplays and novels, such as
The Erasers
(1953), of French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet, affiliated with the New Wave movement in cinema, subordinate plot to the treatment of space and time; directors, such as Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut, led this movement, which in the 1960s abandoned traditional narrative techniques in favor of greater use of symbolism and abstraction and dealt with themes of social alienation, psychopathology, and sexual love.
Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French writer and filmmaker. He was along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon one of the figures most associated with the trend of the Nouveau Roman. Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat #32.
He was married to Catherine Robbe-Grillet (née Rstakian) .
Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in Brest (Finistère, France) into a family of engineers and scientists. He was trained as an agricultural engineer. In the years 1943-44 Robbe-Grillet participated in service du travail obligatoire in Nuremberg where he worked as a machinist. The initial few months were seen by Robbe-Grillet as something of a holiday, since in between the very rudimentary training he was given to operate the machinery he had free time to go to the theatre and the opera. In 1945, Robbe-Grillet completed his diploma at the National Institute of Agronomy. Later, his work as an agronomist took him to Martinique, French Guinea,Guadeloupe and Morocco.
His first novel The Erasers (Les Gommes) was published in 1953, after which he dedicated himself full-time to his new occupation. His early work was praised by eminent critics such as Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. Around the time of his second novel he became a literary advisor for Les Editions de Minuit and occupied this position from 1955 until 1985. After publishing four novels, in 1961 he worked with Alain Renais, writing the script for Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad), and subsequently wrote and directed his own films. In 1963, Robbe-Grillet published For a New Novel (Pour un Nouveau Roman), a collection of previous published theoretical writings concerning the novel. From 1966 to 1968 he was a member of the High Committee for the Defense and Expansion of French (Haut comité pour la défense et l´expansion de la langue française). In addition Robbe-Grillet also led the Centre for Sociology of Literature (Centre de sociologie de la littérature) at the university of Bruxelles from 1980 to 1988. From 1971 to 1995 Robbe-Grillet was a professor at New York University, lecturing on his own novels.
In 2004 Robbe-Grillet was elected to the Académie française, but was never actually formally received by the Académie because of disputes regarding the Académie's reception procedures. Robbe-Grillet both refused to prepare and submit a welcome speech in advance, preferring to improvise his speech, as well as refusing to purchase and wear the Académie's famous green tails (habit vert) and sabre, which he considered as out-dated.
He died in Caen after succumbing to heart problems
Style
His writing style has been described as "realist" or "phenomenological" (in the Heideggerian sense) or "a theory of pure surface." Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace the psychology and interiority of the character. Instead, one slowly pieces together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions. Ironically, this method resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured and the resulting novel resembles the literary
Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French writer and filmmaker. He was along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon one of the figures most associated with the trend of the Nouveau Roman. Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat #32.
He was married to Catherine Robbe-Grillet (née Rstakian) .
Alain Robbe-Grillet was born in Brest (Finistère, France) into a family of engineers and scientists. He was trained as an agricultural engineer. In the years 1943-44 Robbe-Grillet participated in service du travail obligatoire in Nuremberg where he worked as a machinist. The initial few months were seen by Robbe-Grillet as something of a holiday, since in between the very rudimentary training he was given to operate the machinery he had free time to go to the theatre and the opera. In 1945, Robbe-Grillet completed his diploma at the National Institute of Agronomy. Later, his work as an agronomist took him to Martinique, French Guinea,Guadeloupe and Morocco.
His first novel The Erasers (Les Gommes) was published in 1953, after which he dedicated himself full-time to his new occupation. His early work was praised by eminent critics such as Roland Barthes and Maurice Blanchot. Around the time of his second novel he became a literary advisor for Les Editions de Minuit and occupied this position from 1955 until 1985. After publishing four novels, in 1961 he worked with Alain Renais, writing the script for Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad), and subsequently wrote and directed his own films. In 1963, Robbe-Grillet published For a New Novel (Pour un Nouveau Roman), a collection of previous published theoretical writings concerning the novel. From 1966 to 1968 he was a member of the High Committee for the Defense and Expansion of French (Haut comité pour la défense et l´expansion de la langue française). In addition Robbe-Grillet also led the Centre for Sociology of Literature (Centre de sociologie de la littérature) at the university of Bruxelles from 1980 to 1988. From 1971 to 1995 Robbe-Grillet was a professor at New York University, lecturing on his own novels.
In 2004 Robbe-Grillet was elected to the Académie française, but was never actually formally received by the Académie because of disputes regarding the Académie's reception procedures. Robbe-Grillet both refused to prepare and submit a welcome speech in advance, preferring to improvise his speech, as well as refusing to purchase and wear the Académie's famous green tails (habit vert) and sabre, which he considered as out-dated.
He died in Caen after succumbing to heart problems
Style
His writing style has been described as "realist" or "phenomenological" (in the Heideggerian sense) or "a theory of pure surface." Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace the psychology and interiority of the character. Instead, one slowly pieces together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions. Ironically, this method resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured and the resulting novel resembles the literary
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
June 13, 2023
The post-apocalyptic city seen in a nightmare… The city belonging to the end of time… The city imagined by a crazy avant-gardist…
The city is a conglomeration of all the cities ever painted by Piranesi, Max Ernst, Escher and René Magritte… The city is a scene of crime… Everything is shapeshifting… The city is haunted by the bizarre and awesome tableaux vivants…
Cities are ever-changing: the ancient ones lie in ruins and the modern ones are full of perpetual motion.
But there is nothing left, no cry, no rumbling, no distant murmur; nor is the slightest outline discernible to indicate any distinctions, any three-dimensionality in these succeeding planes that were once houses, palaces, avenues. The advancing mist, thickening hourly, has already absorbed everything in its vitreous mass, immobilizing, extinguishing.
Before I fall asleep, still stubbornly persistent, the dead city…
The city is a conglomeration of all the cities ever painted by Piranesi, Max Ernst, Escher and René Magritte… The city is a scene of crime… Everything is shapeshifting… The city is haunted by the bizarre and awesome tableaux vivants…
The water in the bowl, clear of any impurity as yet, is calm again, but its surface now reflects only the tiny panes of the casement, beyond which the early-morning sun shines on the sloping meadows bright with white frost or dew where the phantom girls in long muslin dresses and sunbonnets glide with the light behind them, their feet hardly touching the iridescent grass.
Cities are ever-changing: the ancient ones lie in ruins and the modern ones are full of perpetual motion.
March 1, 2019
Hard to define this one.
Language is useless in describing a book that deprives language of any purpose other than its purposeless flow; a book in which the reader experiences the contemplation of a mute language adressing a landscape of deaf images.
"Topology of a Phantom City": probably the best title I've ever come across.
I explored the topology of my inner phantom city after my beloved had dumped me, a friend had deserted me, I had realised that I would be transferred to another city in two days (career advancement, surprise!) and that I had to leave my fucking job as soon as possible because I couldn't go on anymore - all this in one single day.
Oh, I forgot: I was also starving myself as a therapy against too much thinking (it works pretty good with me). In short, I was professionally successful, looking great and mentally derailing. I felt like crying, laughing, congratulating myself, bashing my head against the wall - until I stopped feeling anything at all.
That night I walked. I walked a lot. I walked and walked and walked, going nowhere, watching kids sharing poppers and whores typing on their phones, crossing stray cats doing their thing, hearing cars passing by and alarms going off and Latinos asking me if I wanted to be fucked in the ass (I was so apathetic I would have felt absolutely nothing). Seeing nothing, hearing nothing but the noise of my footsteps.I could as well have been walking on the moon, because the world had become an abstract concept for me that night. At about 4 am I noticed with indifference that I was sitting on the sidewalk, smoking and talking to a pigeon pecking between my feet.
I was supposed to be at work in two hours.
Have you ever found yourself wandering in the streets, perfectly lucid and totally unconscious at the same time, as though you had left your body behind - somewhere, somehow - and all your being had shrunk in the simple pedestrian thaumaturgical acknowledgement of every single cell and molecule and atom and quark of the substance of your emptiness? Have you ever realised how much silence you had always been carrying inside your head? Have you ever stopped knowing exactly who you are?
If you have, this book will bring back that same feeling of silent, immobile chaos, that feeling of being inside one of Balthus' paintings - trapped in the disquieting tension of Nonsense, ghosts of eroticism and violence lurking behind the door, your reflection in the mirror staring back at you and suggesting strange thoughts of self-abuse.
It's not unpleasant, once you stop fighting it - once you're too drained and exhausted to fight it.
And so is this book.
There's no plot whatsoever here. No real characters, no action, no meaning. Pure Surrealism with a touch of Nouvelle Vague here and there.
There's no explicit violence or sex either, and yet one feels terribly unease nonetheless. Because it's their ghosts that haunt these pages, an atmosphere of impending threat, of hidden traps and nameless dangers... the slippery substance of disquiet.
A nameless and faceless observer wanders through a city out of space and time, or rather encompassing space and time - a hole in the continuum, a city ravaged by some undetermined war or natural disaster or atomic blast or unthinkable cataclysm, or maybe just intoxicated by its own boredom and decadence. Streets covered in dust and debris, buildings collapsed or collapsing, waste lands, lunar seascapes... and a series of gloomy, rundown, surreliastic interiors: a prison (?), a theatre (?), temples from an unlikely antiquity, a brothel, bedrooms, abandoned houses and shops.
Such is the stage on which some obsessively recurring events take place over and over, indecipherable codes made of weird images and cryptic signs. A murder that is also a rape that is also a ritual sacrifice that is also an incest, around which revolves the morbid attention of the most enigmatic teller ever. The reader has absolutely no clue what's going on, and is not even supposed to have any: he can only wander in the streets of Robbe-Grillet's Phantom City, always on the threshold of a meaning that ultimately doesn't exist.
Phantoms indeed: elusive, evanescent, immaterial. Phantoms of characters and events that might have lived and occurred anytime and anywhere.
The city is sort of an archaeological dig in the middle of nowhere, layers upon layers of ages and civilisations that seem to overlap and melt after the unspeakable has occurred... in the author's mind, that is. Because this book is a metaphysical construct, the ultimate celebration of language for its own sake. Give up any attempt to understand or at least decipher its inner structure: that would be a pointless, exhausting waste of mental energy that would only spoil the pleasure of losing oneself in such a labyrinth.
I daresay Borges comes to mind, along with Queneau's Exercices de style and De Chirico's deserted cityscapes. It's a strange, unclassifiable work one can only love or hate, certainly not forget. Robbe-Grillet's poetic prose leaves such a feeling of bewilderment in the reader's mind, such a perplexity and a sense of unease that I can hardly imagine a rating in between.
Good Lord, I don't even know what I have just read.
I feel like my younger self sitting on a sidewalk at 4 am, smoking and talking to a pigeon... knowing the worst had yet to come and too fucked up to really care about it.
Obviously, I'm not recommending this to anybody. I can't imagine anybody else enjoying this book as I did; how could I, since I have no idea why I liked it in the first place?
Language is useless in describing a book that deprives language of any purpose other than its purposeless flow; a book in which the reader experiences the contemplation of a mute language adressing a landscape of deaf images.
"Topology of a Phantom City": probably the best title I've ever come across.
I explored the topology of my inner phantom city after my beloved had dumped me, a friend had deserted me, I had realised that I would be transferred to another city in two days (career advancement, surprise!) and that I had to leave my fucking job as soon as possible because I couldn't go on anymore - all this in one single day.
Oh, I forgot: I was also starving myself as a therapy against too much thinking (it works pretty good with me). In short, I was professionally successful, looking great and mentally derailing. I felt like crying, laughing, congratulating myself, bashing my head against the wall - until I stopped feeling anything at all.
That night I walked. I walked a lot. I walked and walked and walked, going nowhere, watching kids sharing poppers and whores typing on their phones, crossing stray cats doing their thing, hearing cars passing by and alarms going off and Latinos asking me if I wanted to be fucked in the ass (I was so apathetic I would have felt absolutely nothing). Seeing nothing, hearing nothing but the noise of my footsteps.I could as well have been walking on the moon, because the world had become an abstract concept for me that night. At about 4 am I noticed with indifference that I was sitting on the sidewalk, smoking and talking to a pigeon pecking between my feet.
I was supposed to be at work in two hours.
Have you ever found yourself wandering in the streets, perfectly lucid and totally unconscious at the same time, as though you had left your body behind - somewhere, somehow - and all your being had shrunk in the simple pedestrian thaumaturgical acknowledgement of every single cell and molecule and atom and quark of the substance of your emptiness? Have you ever realised how much silence you had always been carrying inside your head? Have you ever stopped knowing exactly who you are?
If you have, this book will bring back that same feeling of silent, immobile chaos, that feeling of being inside one of Balthus' paintings - trapped in the disquieting tension of Nonsense, ghosts of eroticism and violence lurking behind the door, your reflection in the mirror staring back at you and suggesting strange thoughts of self-abuse.
It's not unpleasant, once you stop fighting it - once you're too drained and exhausted to fight it.
And so is this book.
There's no plot whatsoever here. No real characters, no action, no meaning. Pure Surrealism with a touch of Nouvelle Vague here and there.
There's no explicit violence or sex either, and yet one feels terribly unease nonetheless. Because it's their ghosts that haunt these pages, an atmosphere of impending threat, of hidden traps and nameless dangers... the slippery substance of disquiet.
A nameless and faceless observer wanders through a city out of space and time, or rather encompassing space and time - a hole in the continuum, a city ravaged by some undetermined war or natural disaster or atomic blast or unthinkable cataclysm, or maybe just intoxicated by its own boredom and decadence. Streets covered in dust and debris, buildings collapsed or collapsing, waste lands, lunar seascapes... and a series of gloomy, rundown, surreliastic interiors: a prison (?), a theatre (?), temples from an unlikely antiquity, a brothel, bedrooms, abandoned houses and shops.
Such is the stage on which some obsessively recurring events take place over and over, indecipherable codes made of weird images and cryptic signs. A murder that is also a rape that is also a ritual sacrifice that is also an incest, around which revolves the morbid attention of the most enigmatic teller ever. The reader has absolutely no clue what's going on, and is not even supposed to have any: he can only wander in the streets of Robbe-Grillet's Phantom City, always on the threshold of a meaning that ultimately doesn't exist.
Phantoms indeed: elusive, evanescent, immaterial. Phantoms of characters and events that might have lived and occurred anytime and anywhere.
The city is sort of an archaeological dig in the middle of nowhere, layers upon layers of ages and civilisations that seem to overlap and melt after the unspeakable has occurred... in the author's mind, that is. Because this book is a metaphysical construct, the ultimate celebration of language for its own sake. Give up any attempt to understand or at least decipher its inner structure: that would be a pointless, exhausting waste of mental energy that would only spoil the pleasure of losing oneself in such a labyrinth.
I daresay Borges comes to mind, along with Queneau's Exercices de style and De Chirico's deserted cityscapes. It's a strange, unclassifiable work one can only love or hate, certainly not forget. Robbe-Grillet's poetic prose leaves such a feeling of bewilderment in the reader's mind, such a perplexity and a sense of unease that I can hardly imagine a rating in between.
Good Lord, I don't even know what I have just read.
I feel like my younger self sitting on a sidewalk at 4 am, smoking and talking to a pigeon... knowing the worst had yet to come and too fucked up to really care about it.
Obviously, I'm not recommending this to anybody. I can't imagine anybody else enjoying this book as I did; how could I, since I have no idea why I liked it in the first place?
March 26, 2014
Alain Robbe-Grillet writes eroticized fever dreams built of exacting architectural detail, noir gestures, and a heavy atmosphere of ambiguity and displacement. It is this atmosphere, unique among my reading, that makes him terribly strange and compelling to me, even when his narratives become fragmented into non-existence, as here.
The first two sections (of five) are each highly memorable (and self-consistent) in their own right, though. The first traces unexpected paths, as much temporal as spatial, through a ruined city, destroyed by an ancient eruption, or a contemporary bombardment, or both, or neither. Often writing from a fixed camera, Robbe-Grillet begins by laying out a frozen tableau in a sort of women's prison in minute detail, which only becomes animated in any way several pages in, then connects this image back and forth across his fractured history, operating by narrative rules that seem all his own. Part two floats in gradual ascent of a spectral, empty house, seemingly divorced from the first part, but beautifully composed and highly intriguing. From here, a winkingly obfuscating elaboration of part one, clarifying nothing against its own claims, then an even more fractured stretch of shorter prose-poetry dancing out of reach of the prior threads besides his usual tendency to repeat key images over and over.
Each subsequent displacement takes this further out of being anything like a traditional novel, of course and, to me, leaves this even more frustratingly elusive than the other two of Robbe-Grillet's works I've read. Or perhaps this is simply the mark of waning patience after three readings of his books this month, and two viewings of Last Year at Marienbad, which he screenwrote. Which leaves this as unsettling, haunting, but seemingly non-essential, though perhaps I will see it differently upon re-reading (it is short enough to encourage this).
Incidentally, the fifth and final part of this novel is also the opening of La Belle Captive, which I adored (the visual aspect of that novel lending a sense of cohesion all its own), and which also shares text with Recollections of the Golden Triangle, which I'll probably pause for a time before beginning.
I feel that I should talk a lot more about the actual content of this very odd novel, but I don't even know where to begin. It may be impossible to explain its merits to any who haven't read it. Really, borrowing a justification of Lucio Fulci's horror film-making which I think is much better-suited to Robbe-Grillet's prose, "it is not what happens or why it happens, but how it happens that makes these images seductive".
The first two sections (of five) are each highly memorable (and self-consistent) in their own right, though. The first traces unexpected paths, as much temporal as spatial, through a ruined city, destroyed by an ancient eruption, or a contemporary bombardment, or both, or neither. Often writing from a fixed camera, Robbe-Grillet begins by laying out a frozen tableau in a sort of women's prison in minute detail, which only becomes animated in any way several pages in, then connects this image back and forth across his fractured history, operating by narrative rules that seem all his own. Part two floats in gradual ascent of a spectral, empty house, seemingly divorced from the first part, but beautifully composed and highly intriguing. From here, a winkingly obfuscating elaboration of part one, clarifying nothing against its own claims, then an even more fractured stretch of shorter prose-poetry dancing out of reach of the prior threads besides his usual tendency to repeat key images over and over.
Each subsequent displacement takes this further out of being anything like a traditional novel, of course and, to me, leaves this even more frustratingly elusive than the other two of Robbe-Grillet's works I've read. Or perhaps this is simply the mark of waning patience after three readings of his books this month, and two viewings of Last Year at Marienbad, which he screenwrote. Which leaves this as unsettling, haunting, but seemingly non-essential, though perhaps I will see it differently upon re-reading (it is short enough to encourage this).
Incidentally, the fifth and final part of this novel is also the opening of La Belle Captive, which I adored (the visual aspect of that novel lending a sense of cohesion all its own), and which also shares text with Recollections of the Golden Triangle, which I'll probably pause for a time before beginning.
I feel that I should talk a lot more about the actual content of this very odd novel, but I don't even know where to begin. It may be impossible to explain its merits to any who haven't read it. Really, borrowing a justification of Lucio Fulci's horror film-making which I think is much better-suited to Robbe-Grillet's prose, "it is not what happens or why it happens, but how it happens that makes these images seductive".
January 5, 2016
Reading Robbe-Grillet novels induces a fugue state in my reading mind. I only ever have a dim understanding of what is transpiring in the text and yet I read on transfixed, certain there will be no resolution and that at the end I will know little more than when I began. R-G’s constant reconfiguring of events, of settings, of objects, his replacing, adding, omitting, contradicting, it seems like it should be maddening but instead yields a languorous effect.
Full review here.
January 3, 2021
تعیین موقعیت شهر خیالی، همهی ویژگیهای نوشتههای ربگریه رو داره با این تفاوت که این بار، ویژگیهای سینمای ربگریه هم توش مشهوده.
یکی از چیزهایی که این کتاب رو برای من عزیز میکنه، قسمت هاییشه که یادآور افسانه ها و داستانهای پریان، یا اسطوره هاست.
فصل چهارم، تحت عنوان “خیالپردازی های دختران خردسال زندانی میان پنجره و آینه” بسیار بسیار زیباست. از عنوانش هم مشخصه که چقدر شاعرانه و آمیخته به خیالبافیه، خلاصه، همین فصل چهار، فصل مورد علاقهی منه. :)
یکی از چیزهایی که این کتاب رو برای من عزیز میکنه، قسمت هاییشه که یادآور افسانه ها و داستانهای پریان، یا اسطوره هاست.
فصل چهارم، تحت عنوان “خیالپردازی های دختران خردسال زندانی میان پنجره و آینه” بسیار بسیار زیباست. از عنوانش هم مشخصه که چقدر شاعرانه و آمیخته به خیالبافیه، خلاصه، همین فصل چهار، فصل مورد علاقهی منه. :)
Read
February 26, 2019This was recommended as one of his best. Instead it showed me how he is at his worst. (There is a new edition of "Voyeur," which I may re-read.) This is a stultifying pastiche and tortured ekphrasis of Paul Delvaux. Shows just how frozen, how petrified, his imagination is when it's not focused on an actual scene.
January 4, 2024
more:
by-
Jealousy & In the Labyrinth
The Erasers
Last Year at Marienbad
Voyeur
La Maison de rendez-vous
Project for a Revolution in New York
La Belle Captive
Topology of a Phantom City
Recollections of the Golden Triangle
Djinn
Repetition
A Regicide
A Sentimental Novel
francaise-
La Jalousie
Dans le labyrinthe
Les Gommes
L'année dernière à Marienbad
Instantanés
on-
For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
Generative Literature and Generative Art: New Essays
Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Body of the Text
The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films
Inventing The Real World: The Art of Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet
September 24, 2019
A still life of trauma
Or
The dead labour of desire
Or
Bauhaus conspires against the real
Or
Topology of an absent man
Or
The museum of disasters
Or
Or
The dead labour of desire
Or
Bauhaus conspires against the real
Or
Topology of an absent man
Or
The museum of disasters
Or
August 18, 2020
«Finalmente stanca di guardare l’occhio indecifrabile che la spia, si gira alzando le spalle, si raggomitola su se stessa, finge di essere invasa da un sonno fanciullesco. Non vuole neanche più sentire la palpebra a scatto che si apre e si chiude periodicamente sulla preda. Assente e offerta, candida, indifferente, lascia fare quel che si vuole della sua immagine». Trovo in queste righe del romanzo la descrizione dell’operazione compiuta dall’autore: un occhio enigmatico che descrive luoghi e persone, evidenziando analogie e connessioni inspiegate, sfiorando – senza mai risolverlo – il mistero di un omicidio, in un’atmosfera surreale, onirica, in cui il mondo descritto appare in continua trasformazione.
December 11, 2021
Significantly more enjoyable - less awful? - than 'Project for a Revolution...' Robbe Grillet returns (hah!) to his earlier obsessions with detail, geometry, and repetition. In a less serious/more ironic vein, he repeats passages and lines and details from his other works, which would seem to triple-down on the Nouveau roman ideas of unreality, perspective, observation, truth, and time. Others have noted a pervasive dread in this novel which I missed entirely, or maybe I read too much Cthulhu-themed work to feel anything like that from Robbe Grillet. Ah, but that is merely my observation, is it not? Hah! As usual, we get the not-so-latent misogyny-sexist male gaze subtext, which isn't objectionable just trite and insipid. I enjoyed the architectural jottings and the superficial noir-ish feel, though I doubt Robbe Grillet had anything that specific in mind, un-novelist he was. Paraphrasing a essay from Annie Dillard, books such as this with their need to stress or point out their "un-story-ness" do little for the emotions but much more for the intellect. So if you prefer thinking and abstraction over/instead of plot and feelings, Robbe Grillet might be just your thing. I can enjoy him, though there are numerous times my thought games pull me completely out of his narrative, which could be the whole point. As I see it, anyway, since truth is elusive and phenomenal, as Kant would posit, were he alive. Maybe. Not "maybe alive", but "maybe he would posit that".
April 10, 2020
Begins as a description of the gestural minutiae of an image which is always shifting slightly. The prism of the fragmented story rotates around this idea slowly, explicating a series of murders and/or ritual sacrifices of young women in a variety of narrative styles.
October 29, 2018
Ho faticato un po' a digerire questo libro, ed è ben strano a dire il vero.All'inizio non ho capito bene cosa ho letto, e dopo un bel periodo trascorso durante il quale di tanto in tanto ho ripensato a questo libro, ho concluso che non devo capirlo.Il testo è decostruzione, questo è l'unico commento possibile.In un'ambientazione onirica che mi ha fatto pensare ai quadri di De Chirico, c'è un'idea di trama che in realtà si avvolge su se stessa senza andare da nessuna parte, ripetendo, in gioco di scatole cinesi, un singolo evento che sovrappone se stesso in rappresentazione e realtà, facendo pensare al fatto che la realtà è rappresentazione teatrale di se stessa. Ma questa è solo una sfumata riflessione che sfugge a se stessa come altre che sembrano emergere leggendo, così come la simbologia che sembra essere il perno portante del testo è un susseguirsi di immagini colte al di là di un vetro opaco: ombre, o meglio rappresentazioni di ombre, o meglio idee di rappresentazioni di ombre, o meglio ipotesi di idee di rappresentazioni di ombre...Alla fine mi son trovato a chiedermi cosa mi fosse restato, il senso, l'impressione.E a distanza di tempo, ora solo m'accorgo che mi resta la sensazioni inquieta di un dubbioso e attorcigliato groviglio sfumato di significati che non possono essere colti perchè forse, e forse dico, il significato, nella vita, non c'è.
January 7, 2020
In which Patrick Stewart in Extras recounts a boring nonsense dream.
December 14, 2024
«Topology of a Phantom City». An evocative title, now go daydream.
I offer my thoughts from these ghostly streets and alleys, where I have been wandering and lurking in surroundings unfamiliar to me, mostly in twilight, it seems. I have seen (or thought I saw) things that gave me a premonition of danger and a sense of foreboding. There are ruins everywhere, I might fall down a precipice any moment. I must pay attention, but it does not make much sense either way. I cannot be trusted. I inspect old museums, where I always end up transfixed before a lush painting of a woman with translucent skin, violet grapes being crushed by drunk soldiers, the juice running down her skin. She stares back at me with empty eyes, a dead look, it is unsettling, I must try not to be paranoid, surely these are not barbarian shores. The sea murmurs in the background, the tide is coming in. This is a desolate corner of the world.
I will buy this book and reread it. I borrowed it from the library and had to return it because there was a waiting list. So I read the last part as fast as I could while the library kept sending me messages saying I would have to pay a fine if I didn’t return it soon, and this book should be, must be read slowly and I tried to do that despite the threats but it was a bit stressful. I will probably have more to say when I have reread the book, my own gorgeously titled copy.
I offer my thoughts from these ghostly streets and alleys, where I have been wandering and lurking in surroundings unfamiliar to me, mostly in twilight, it seems. I have seen (or thought I saw) things that gave me a premonition of danger and a sense of foreboding. There are ruins everywhere, I might fall down a precipice any moment. I must pay attention, but it does not make much sense either way. I cannot be trusted. I inspect old museums, where I always end up transfixed before a lush painting of a woman with translucent skin, violet grapes being crushed by drunk soldiers, the juice running down her skin. She stares back at me with empty eyes, a dead look, it is unsettling, I must try not to be paranoid, surely these are not barbarian shores. The sea murmurs in the background, the tide is coming in. This is a desolate corner of the world.
I will buy this book and reread it. I borrowed it from the library and had to return it because there was a waiting list. So I read the last part as fast as I could while the library kept sending me messages saying I would have to pay a fine if I didn’t return it soon, and this book should be, must be read slowly and I tried to do that despite the threats but it was a bit stressful. I will probably have more to say when I have reread the book, my own gorgeously titled copy.
September 15, 2023
There is a cell and a scene out its window, except it's actually a theater tableau in a play depicting a city's mythological past. Or perhaps it's not a myth at all, since, in the city's streets, scenes from the myth seem to be recurring with only slight alteration. Myth becomes city becomes theater becomes myth, and on the cycle goes.
Walking through a silent mansion populated by sleepwalkers, a dream of youth and beauty is muted by a languorous ambiance with a vaguely sinister undertone.
Strange murders lead to a dilapidated building, the jumbled past of which suggests perversions of love, but now it may be the site of much darker events.
Imprisoned in a room, in a mirror, in a photograph, in an eye. A chain of crass games, playful cruelty, transformations and incestuous love.
In Topology of a Phantom City you walk these strange settings, then walk them again after they have been newly twisted. Does this sound interesting to you? If it does, be warned: I've marked this review as containing spoilers because the exploration of these settings is the entirety of this work, don't pick it up expecting any more. Although perhaps “entirety” is unfair, perhaps there is some sort of overarching plot to piece together in the dreamlike sections that Alain Robbe-Grillet presents. After all, there are certainly recurring elements, including but not limited to Vanadis, barred windows, vermillion blood pools, pages torn out of an exercise book floating in water, and screams. I didn’t find that they coalesced into anything greater than the sum of their parts, though. This is one of those books where I let the prose wash over me, and enjoyed it as an aesthetic experience more than anything else. I see why, in that capacity, someone might truly adore Topology of a Phantom City.
I, on the other hand, liked it but didn’t love it. Through no fault of its own this work suffers in comparison to a book that I recently reread, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I couldn’t help but compare Calvino’s vignettes of phantasmal metropolises (that’s the right word, I checked) to Robbe-Grillet’s, and I ended up finding the latter wanting. I can easily see someone reaching the opposite conclusion and preferring Robbe-Grillet’s lengthier descriptions, or finding the more menacing tone of the work more evocative than the melancholy whimsy of Invisible Cities, but I can only rate a book from my own perspective.
Robbe-Grillet’s prose is quite good, and he uses it here to spin evocative descriptions of a city somewhere on the edge between dream and nightmare. I enjoyed reading it, though it’s not the best example of this micro-niche subgenre that I happen to have read recently. Thus I give this one a 3.5/5, rounding down.
P.S. Coming back to this work less than three months later, I can barely remember it. I understand that it has a dream-like atmosphere, but most works that strike the same tone still manage to stick with me. For whatever reason Topology of a Phantom City had absolutely no staying power, so I'm lowering the score slightly to a 3/5.
Walking through a silent mansion populated by sleepwalkers, a dream of youth and beauty is muted by a languorous ambiance with a vaguely sinister undertone.
Strange murders lead to a dilapidated building, the jumbled past of which suggests perversions of love, but now it may be the site of much darker events.
Imprisoned in a room, in a mirror, in a photograph, in an eye. A chain of crass games, playful cruelty, transformations and incestuous love.
In Topology of a Phantom City you walk these strange settings, then walk them again after they have been newly twisted. Does this sound interesting to you? If it does, be warned: I've marked this review as containing spoilers because the exploration of these settings is the entirety of this work, don't pick it up expecting any more. Although perhaps “entirety” is unfair, perhaps there is some sort of overarching plot to piece together in the dreamlike sections that Alain Robbe-Grillet presents. After all, there are certainly recurring elements, including but not limited to Vanadis, barred windows, vermillion blood pools, pages torn out of an exercise book floating in water, and screams. I didn’t find that they coalesced into anything greater than the sum of their parts, though. This is one of those books where I let the prose wash over me, and enjoyed it as an aesthetic experience more than anything else. I see why, in that capacity, someone might truly adore Topology of a Phantom City.
I, on the other hand, liked it but didn’t love it. Through no fault of its own this work suffers in comparison to a book that I recently reread, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. I couldn’t help but compare Calvino’s vignettes of phantasmal metropolises (that’s the right word, I checked) to Robbe-Grillet’s, and I ended up finding the latter wanting. I can easily see someone reaching the opposite conclusion and preferring Robbe-Grillet’s lengthier descriptions, or finding the more menacing tone of the work more evocative than the melancholy whimsy of Invisible Cities, but I can only rate a book from my own perspective.
Robbe-Grillet’s prose is quite good, and he uses it here to spin evocative descriptions of a city somewhere on the edge between dream and nightmare. I enjoyed reading it, though it’s not the best example of this micro-niche subgenre that I happen to have read recently. Thus I give this one a 3.5/5, rounding down.
P.S. Coming back to this work less than three months later, I can barely remember it. I understand that it has a dream-like atmosphere, but most works that strike the same tone still manage to stick with me. For whatever reason Topology of a Phantom City had absolutely no staying power, so I'm lowering the score slightly to a 3/5.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 1, 2024
For someone who loves the idea of a strange city this feels disappointing as Robbe-Grillet perambulates through interesting city descriptions that feel inconsequential in the end. However the re-framing of the central event in this book was very interesting and well done. By far the most memorable part about the book.
Also this has to be the most voyeuristic thing I’ve read. Some of it honestly reminds me of those movies where teenage boys using binoculars spy on girls through the window.
Also this has to be the most voyeuristic thing I’ve read. Some of it honestly reminds me of those movies where teenage boys using binoculars spy on girls through the window.
September 4, 2016
Bad Dreams
by Joni Mitchell
The cats are in the flower bed
A red hawk rides the sky
I guess I should be happy
Just to be alive...
But we have poisoned everything
And oblivious to it all
The cell phone zombies babble
Through the shopping malls
While condors fall from Indian skies
Whales beach and die in sand...
Bad dreams are good
In the great plan.
You cannot be trusted
Do you even know you're lying
It's dangerous to kid yourself
You go deaf and dumb and blind.
You take with such entitlement.
You give bad attitude.
You have no grace
No empathy
No gratitude
You have no sense of consequence
Oh my head is in my hands...
Bad dreams are good
In the great plan.
Before that altering apple
We were one with everything
No sense of self and other
No self-consciousness.
But now we have to grapple
With our man-made world backfiring
Keeping one eye on our brother's deadly selfishness.
And everyone's a victim!
Nobody's hands are clean.
There's so very little left of wild Eden Earth
So near the jaws of our machines.
We live in these electric scabs.
These lesions once were lakes.
No one knows how to shoulder the blame
Or learn from past mistakes...
So who will come to save the day?
Mighty Mouse?
Superman?
Bad dreams are good in the great plan.
© 2007; Crazy Crow Music
via http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cf...
by Joni Mitchell
The cats are in the flower bed
A red hawk rides the sky
I guess I should be happy
Just to be alive...
But we have poisoned everything
And oblivious to it all
The cell phone zombies babble
Through the shopping malls
While condors fall from Indian skies
Whales beach and die in sand...
Bad dreams are good
In the great plan.
You cannot be trusted
Do you even know you're lying
It's dangerous to kid yourself
You go deaf and dumb and blind.
You take with such entitlement.
You give bad attitude.
You have no grace
No empathy
No gratitude
You have no sense of consequence
Oh my head is in my hands...
Bad dreams are good
In the great plan.
Before that altering apple
We were one with everything
No sense of self and other
No self-consciousness.
But now we have to grapple
With our man-made world backfiring
Keeping one eye on our brother's deadly selfishness.
And everyone's a victim!
Nobody's hands are clean.
There's so very little left of wild Eden Earth
So near the jaws of our machines.
We live in these electric scabs.
These lesions once were lakes.
No one knows how to shoulder the blame
Or learn from past mistakes...
So who will come to save the day?
Mighty Mouse?
Superman?
Bad dreams are good in the great plan.
© 2007; Crazy Crow Music
via http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cf...
April 26, 2014
I think I'm generally pretty good at figuring out what Robbe-Grillet is going for, but this went a little over my head. Still, I respect him enough as a writer to assume that's a failing on my part, not his. I definitely need to re-read this at some point.
October 19, 2007
don't read this on the subway!
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews