{"id":2299,"date":"2009-01-01T23:52:35","date_gmt":"2009-01-02T04:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=2299"},"modified":"2009-01-01T23:52:35","modified_gmt":"2009-01-02T04:52:35","slug":"a-new-years-toast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=2299","title":{"rendered":"A new year’s toast"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I was reading one of those horrible year-end reviews articles in the Boston Globe<\/em>, and in the long list of people who died in 2008, I saw the name of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French novelist.<\/p>\n

Somehow back in 1989, I no longer remember how or why, I read Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jalousie<\/em>. The novel mostly consists of very precisely-described scenes, often things half-seen through the wooden slats of the jalousie windows of a banana plantation in a French colony somewhere in the tropics; and through these descriptions, written landscapes and still-lives as it were, Robbe-Grillet revealed one man’s intense jealousy towards his wife’s friendship with another man.<\/p>\n

It was the right book at the right time for me. I saw that you could write precisely and carefully about one thing, while you were really telling your reader something else altogether. I learned that some things can only be precisely described in this oblique manner.<\/p>\n

Later, I tried to read some of Robbe-Grillet’s other books. They were dry and pointless, sometimes to the point of being silly. I have never tried to go back and re-read Jalousie<\/em>, for fear that I would find that it, too, is a dry, pointless, and silly book — I would rather remember it as the right book at the right time, that taught me exactly what I then needed to learn about writing. So even though I will never read his novels again, here’s a new year’s toast to Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. August 18, 1922, d. February 18, 2008).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I was reading one of those horrible year-end reviews articles in the Boston Globe, and in the long list of people who died in 2008, I saw the name of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the French novelist. Somehow back in 1989, I no longer remember how or why, I read Robbe-Grillet’s novel Jalousie. The novel mostly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2300,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299\/revisions\/2300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}