Press Association
Monday February 18, 2008
guardian.co.uk
Alain Robbe-Grillet, a “new novelist” and film-maker who rejected conventional storytelling and was one of France’s most important avant-garde writers has died at the age of 85. Robbe-Grillet was admitted to the Caen University Hospital in western France over the weekend for cardiac problems, the officials said. He died in the hospital on Monday morning.
Robbe-Grillet wrote screenplays for such films as Last Year at Marienbad (1961) with Alain Resnais, and directed L’Immortelle (The Immortal) (1963), Trans-Europ-Express (1967) and Eden and After (1970).
He was the most prominent of France’s “new novelists,” a group that emerged in the mid-1950s and whose experimental works tossed aside traditional literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation. Others included Claude Simon, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute.