'In France, the recently published novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet - Un Roman Sentimental - is creating something of a stir, with calls from various sources for its actual ban. Publishers Fayard, aware of its potential to disturb, even went to the extent of issuing the book with pages uncut, sporting a sober, purely typographical cover, with each copy shrink-wrapped and featuring a warning sticker to the effect that "this is a fairy tale for adults and a fantasy that might well shock sensitive souls". Were Robbe-Grillet not a member of the respected Academie Francaise and best known for having invented the ascetic and stylised form of the nouveau roman, it is unlikely his novel could have been published at all even in these liberated times. But then, cinemagoers will recall the frequent nudity and sado-masochistic tropes present in many of the art films he has directed, including Trans-Europ-Express, La Belle Captive, Glissements Progressifs Du Désir and L'Éden et Après. Unlike the flesh on frequent display in the films of Peter Greenaway, Robbe-Grillet's movies never had the alibi of a painter's perspective and the bound, captive women he loved to display always evoked a disturbing sense of troubled eroticism and deliberate fetishism.
'Un Roman Sentimental, however, is unlikely to be filmed. It's a venomous flower of a novel which defies convention and taste and takes a tradition invented by the Marquis de Sade, principally in 120 Days of Sodom (the Prix Sade jurors presciently awarded their prize to Robbe-Grillet in 2004 for the whole of his oeuvre), and its film adaptation by Pasolini in Salò.
'Gigi, also known as Djinn, a young girl in her early teens, is being groomed by her father to become a woman much like her own mother, Violetta, whose education, contamination and death by devices and persons unknown occurred some 10 years before the novel begins. The fact that Gigi is underage and sleeps naked in her own father's bed is only the transgressive prelude to a series of stories within stories within stories in which the fate of similar young girls is examined in the most minute detail, often culminating in terrible orgies of desecration, violation and ecstatic torture to the point of death. Every female character in the book is well under the age of consent, and are all complicit in their fate to a troubling extent.
'There is little doubt that Robbe-Grillet is a major writer and the precise, almost analytical prose that unfolds over the 239 short chapters is classically elegant even as the action moves from disturbing to perverse and well beyond. The book is intended to shock but also to arouse in the most unhealthy of ways, as an hypnotic waltz of domination and submission forces the reader to face his or her own morality or even sanity. Excessive it no doubt is, but it also engenders a worrisome form of fascination for the evil inside us, the temptations of sex for its own sake.' -- Maxim Jakubowski, The Guardian
A young man cuts the pages of 'Un Roman Sentimental' (8:26)
Born and raised in Iran before the revolution, Dorna Khazeni is the cosmopolitan daughter of an architect and a social worker. She spoke fluent French and Farsi by the time she reached junior high school, and attended boarding schools in England and France before starting college -- which included some classes with Jacques Derrida -- eventually earning a BA in French literature and a master's in film. Her many works as a translator include Michel Houellebecq's H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (Believer Books) and Tony Duvert's l'Ile Atlantique (forthcoming). She is a filmmaker whose short work 'Whimsy' was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, and she has written widely on film and culture.
A profile of Dorna Khazeni
DK on HP Lovecraft @ The Believer
DK interviews Mania Akbari @ Bright Lights Film Journal
DK interviews Shirin Neshat @ The Believer
Chris Marker's 'Phenomenon (n.)', trans, by DK
A Translators Roundtable @ Bookslut
Un Roman Sentimental
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Fayard, 2007
1. At first sight, the place in which I find myself is neutral, white, so to speak; not dazzlingly white, rather of a non-descript hue, deceptive, ephemeral, and also altogether absent. If there were something to see in front of me, it could be seen without any difficulty under this even lighting that is neither excessive nor stingy, stripped, in the final analysis, of all adjectivity. Inside a space such as this, half-heartedly asserting its indifference, it’s neither hot nor cold.
2. The only problem upon reflection, is of a different nature altogether: I don’t know what I’m doing here, nor why I’ve come here, with what conscious or impulsive intention, if one could even say that there had been any intention at all at some point… But at what point? Perhaps I was driven here by force, against my will, in spite of myself even, or something along those lines. Am I in prison for some misdeed, offence, crime, or on the contrary, due to a misunderstanding, a victim of mistaken identity.
3. The room seems cubic, without any visible windows or doors, without any furniture or decoration. I am motionless, lying on my back, my legs outstretched, my arm resting alongside my body, my chest a little raised by an incline of about twenty degrees from the (metallic?) chassis of what must be a very low box spring, possibly such as can be adjusted, perhaps to an even greater height than normal, hinged like a patient’s in a hospital. So, could I be in intensive care at some clinic, surgical or other? The thought crosses my mind that this may well be a morgue where my lifeless body has been transported following an accident…
4. Something, however, just as quickly, prevents me from subscribing to this sort of hypothesis: if I were dead, and above all, exposed in this manner in the freezing atmosphere of a funeral chamber, I would feel the cold penetrate me little by little. Whereas, I feel the inverse sensation, the rising warmth of a bower, soon of heat even, accompanied by tropical, forest-like exhalations, whose damp and heavy blasts besiege me, disorient me, invade me. In my torpor, I believe I see diffuse light on the walls surrounding me moving, as if the sun, sifted by the leaves of immense trees teeming, up above, with a felted murmur, was alighting on land (and on me) in the form of a haze of particles without precise contours, without direction, without a plan.
5. Towards the back wall, the one onto which my languid eyes wander most easily, I distinguish, in the foreground of a picture that quickly proves to be a forest landscape of vertical and straight trunks, a sort of water basin so clear it becomes almost immaterial, an oblong widening of a limpid spring, as deep as a bathtub or deeper even, in between grey rocks, whose curved shapes are sweet to touch, welcoming. A girl is sitting there, on stone polished by wear that to her represents an ideal bench at the water’s edge, her long legs kick around unrestrained in the blue mirrored ripples of the lovely nymphæum that is as natural as it is picturesque, whose temperature must be identical to the room’s temperature and to those feminine charms undulating, already liquid, over the moving mirror and its unforeseen shudders.
6. The swimmer is so much a part of her warm, caressing, ambrosiac environment that she dwells there unperturbed, entirely naked. A barely ripe adolescent, she is graceful, shapely, and her flesh is so white, so far from the amber one might expect in a native—whose savage beauty, the color of bronzed caramel, and lively gestures like prey on the qui vive, would suit the apparent landscape from which she emerges—so improbable a milky apparition is she, that one might instead believe she is in a northern European bathroom, climate-controlled along the lines of a Turkish bath, wall-papered in a fanciful equatorial décor.
7. The girl, vaguely engaged in bathing, holds her arms raised on either side of her face. She is in the process of removing a towel made of white fluffy fabric wrapped around her head like a sort of madras, progressively releasing a mane whose pale golden tresses fall on her shoulders that she shakes lightly so as to tidy her supple curls, finally raising eyes of an azure to match her incarnation as a beautiful blond child, innocent and fragile. Did she lower her eyelids in my direction, for a brief instant?
8. But then a man’s voice is heard calling from outside, very near, imperiously: “Angina!” Or more precisely, “Ann-Djinn-a,” in a vaguely Anglo-Saxon pronunciation that, in any case, manages to avoid the offensive confusion with a sore throat hailing from colder lands. This, evidently, is the bather’s first name, for this latter, still holding her towel in her hands, promptly raises her face that she turns towards the wall on the right. This could be her father, or some other mature relative, who, from an adjoining room, is ordering her to join him in a tone that requires no reply. Besides, the girl obtemperates straight away.
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