In literature and the arts, as in history, the vital process of rebellion and regeneration needs to be activated by cataclysmic events. Just as World War I released the creative energies channeled into dada and surrealism, post-World War II Europe saw...

Robert Pinget trained to be a lawyer, had ideas of becoming a cellist, tried to live in Paris as a painter, and ended up being a novelist, one of the most artful, distinctive and enjoyable novelists to have written in French since 1945. ...

Les Mots des autres: lieu commun et creation romanesque dans les oeuvres de Gustave Flaubert, Nathalie Sarraute et Robert Pinget. By LAURENT ADERT. (Collection 'Objet') Villeneuve d'Ascq (Nord): Presses Universitaires du Septentrion. 1996. 301 pp. 130 F. In this stimulating and well-written...

Quelqu'un portrays and is itself a desperate attempt to create links between the narrator and the other characters and between the narrator and the reader, even if the universe which arises as a result is an infernal one. The title of the novel itself appears to demonstrate this awesome power of words. The word "quelqu'un" effectively emblematizes the major concerns of this work, as well as of Pinget's fiction in general…. [Very] little specific information is advan...

Although it is not directly derivative, Cette Voix bears the stamp of much that was creative in experimental, surrealist writing of the twenties. Pinget's prose abounds in hilarious malapropisms, expresses a delightful taste for the incongruous and the unexpected, and unfolds through a process of automatic writing, disciplined and focused by exhaustive reworking. There is no plot in the novel. Nor are there well-defined characters. Rather a voice or a series of voices rambles on about a variety of su...

Pinget's unillusioned tenderness towards the mixed creatures who inhabit his special French province makes him one of the most appealing of the Nouveaux Romanciers. Often compared to Beckett and Robbe-Grillet because of his stylistic demonstration of the inadequacy of language and the arbitrariness of narration, he departs from their examples by using anecdotes that are touching and unpretentious. Like Camus's Dr. Rieux, Pinget finds in man more to admire than condemn. (p. 182) [Le Libera is a...