Jealousy, his third book, was booed, even if Nabokov called it one of the greatest novels of the century. By 1957, Robbe-Grillet was literary adviser at Les Editions de Minuit, the legendary publishing house, promoting Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute and Samuel Beckett. “Molloy and Malone Dies are great New Novels, but they sold 1,000 copies apiece.” Fortunately for Minuit, Beckett also wrote a play called Waiting for Godot. “Everybody thought Godot was God, which was good for sales – universal despair etc If you asked Beckett, he used to say ‘God? No.

I was thinking of godasses’”: a vaguely ribald term for brogues.Such good company must have been solace in itself “I knew we were great,” he laughs. “The problem was that no one else did.” In the Sixties and Seventies, however, Robbe-Grillet was one of the world’s most famous authors. As well as the novels, the screenplay for Alain Resnais’s classic Last Year in Marienbad, and his own films as writer-director, he was also polemicising, talking theory. He lit, as he says in his essay collection For a New Novel, “firecrackers under the chairs of the dozing academy”.Some writers are jealous of their solitude. “But I’m a bit like Jesus Christ,” he owns: “I have to talk to the Pharisees!” Whether the Pharisees are academics isn’t clear. More than any living novelist, Robbe-Grillet’s works have provided matter for countless doctoral theses. Such aptness to theoretical disquisition led Saul Bellow to complain that New Novels read like PhDs.

Unfair and wrong, though that is, French literature could do without its stern, institutional reputation abroad.This said, a state institution called Imec now owns virtually everything Alain Robbe-Grillet has ever written “I’ve been nationalised!” he says. “Even this flat, my home in Normandy, my cactus collection, belongs to them A few years ago they bought me out. As my wife and I have no heirs, all this will become part of the national heritage.” Robbe-Grillet is unfazed about sitting in his own museum. While an undoubtedly exhaustive biography is in preparation at Imec, he’s busy with the proofs of La Gradiva Is Calling You, a cine-novel based on a famous study of Freud’s.True, his oeuvre exacts effort from the reader, but often overlooked is its playfulness Much of it is there in his punning, wisecracking talk A friend calls, complaining of feeling poorly “Take plenty of red wine,” he urges “All my novels”, he follows on, “are comic. Perhaps La Reprise more.” Written in the form of a report by Henri Robin, a bumbling spy sent to the ruins of post-war Berlin on a mission whose purpose he’s none too sure about, it has also been his most successful work – “a bestseller rather than a longseller”.The Reprise is a sado-erotic, incestuous bestseller for all that. Stumbling past corpses and through empty hotel rooms, the hapless Robin finds love in a brothel with Gigi, a teenage prostitute.

A hair-raising torture scene ensues, involving an on-the-run Wehrmacht officer, Gigi’s -brother and a cigar Of its darkness, the author demurs “It’s much nicer than Sade,” he says. “It’s a love story, after all.”This is accompanied by a grin. Robbe-Grillet’s work has never shied from shaky issues such as sado-masochism and corrupted child-women. Famously, the youthful nudity in his film Glissements Progressifs du Plaisir so upset the Italian authorities, they burnt all copies in public.La Reprise was written because in winter 1999 a storm hit northern France.