Product Description: "It begins with a stone falling, in the silence, vertically, immobile. It is falling from a great height, a meteor, a massive, compact, oblong block of rock, like a giant egg with a pocked, uneven surface." The opening sentence of La Belle Captive introduces a dreamworld where the conventions of the traditional novel have been overthrown. Objects move through space without regard to laws of nature, characters move through the text in a maddening complex of events. Published in 1975, Alain Robbe-Grillet's nouveau roman is illustrated with 77 paintings by René Magritte. Robbe-Grillet uses Magritte's paintings as pretexts for the novel, letting them generate themes for an imaginary discourse that parallels their imagery, glosses them, contradicts them. Simultaneously, he comments on Magritte's paintings while taking advantage of them to parade his own favorite themes: play, eroticism, subversion. Robbe-Grillet gives us a plot that frustrates expectations yet shares his pleasure with the mysterious and poetic in Magritte's art, and with the cultural myths that painter and novelist both parody. The book includes a critical essay by novelist and translator Ben Stoltzfus on the pictorial and linguistic affinities between Magritte and Robbe-Grillet. Stoltzfus explores the image of the beautiful captive not only in her mythical and erotic dimensions, but also as a metaphor for the artistic process.
How could this possibly go wrong? Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the greatest 20th century writers, and arguably the most important living one, teamed up with the paintings of Rene Magritte, another superlative figure in 20th century art. How could this possibly go wrong? For starters, the translation is not by Richard Howard, who translated The Voyeur, Jealousy, and basically all of Robbe-Grillet's greatest works. No other translator has ever achieved the precision, polish and perfection of Howard's efforts, which have the effect of making even Robbe-Grillet's most Gothic passages seem incomparably elegant.
The other glaring problem with the book is the quality of the painting reproductions. Printed in low-detail black and white, they function schematically as narrative signposts, but convey little beauty in their own right. Having viewed almost all the original paintings, I would say that even full-color glossy reproductions generally fail to convey their surprising sensuousness, and that the reproductions in this book fail miserably. They're just plain ugly.
This is not a bad book, by any means, but it does fall very far short of what it might have been.
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