Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist and screenwriter, has died.

"An originator of the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, and the screenwriter for Alain Resnais’s 1961 cult film “Last Year at Marienbad,” Mr. Robbe-Grillet was the very model of a postwar avant-gardist. His attempts to wrest fiction free from 19th-century constraints like plot and character, and to wrest objects free from imposed meaning, were never entirely popular with readers but had a decisive influence on critical theory and on the art of the novel, as well as on film, art and even psychology."

...

"The novel, Mr. Robbe-Grillet contended, was a 19th-century form, epitomized by the rich, naturalistic worlds of Balzac and Flaubert. The 20th century, though, was characterized by fragmentation and existential doubt, and the novel reached “a degree of stagnation,” he argued in his essay “A Fresh Start for Fiction.” He called for a radical departure: anti-realist, anti-naturalist, anti-descriptive, apolitical. “In this future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be ‘there’ before being ‘something,’ ” he wrote. “They will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own meaning.”

Read the entire article on Times:
Remembering Alain Robee-Grillet