Reviews for Le silence de la mer

The average rating for Le silence de la mer based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-04-17 00:00:00 Rosemarie Ippolito A vast multiplication of narrative possibilities. Robbe-Grillet has written many versions of this kind constant reconfiguration of pulp tropes over the years, but probably never so completely as here. This story of drug-running, mysterious bordellos, and murder isn't just sequentially reframed to modify reader understanding, but constantly broken apart down to a few archetypal characters and events that can be infinitely rearranged and reinterpreted until ever possibility has been exhausted. Any one scene connects (seamlessly, in the highly refined R-G manner) rationally to those that precede and follow, but will completely be at odds with nearly anything else we're told outside of that window. In this way, this could be look at the internal revision process of forming a plotline (like its immediate predecessor In The Labyrinth, or perhaps, given its further point along Robbe-Grillet's move towards post-modern erotica, an attempt to to recreate the internal rehearsals of scenes generated only by desire, flickering in and out of existence in the mind like the Salvador Dali fantasy vision contained within The Dedalus Book of Surrealism. Or perhaps it's more like Italo Calvino's "The Burning of the Abominable House", wherein an insurance agent attempts to reconstruct all the possibilities for four people and a list of unseemly acts -- except in R-G's story, all these possibilities exist in dizzying multiverse simultaneity. And yep, that sleazoid 60s Grove Black Cat cover is actually the one I've got, although in the typical R-G fashion of infinite build-up without true climax, everything here is pretty much suggestion and context, blanks to be filled-in, avoiding anything so literal and obvious as the cover-girl-in-chains there. I bet that one moved some copies though.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-03 00:00:00 Clinton Reach Mesmeric disorientation as perfected by Robbe-Grillet, a master of unresolvable mysteries.