Born in Brest, in Brittany, on 18 August 1922, Alain Robbe-Grillet, the most influential French writer of his generation, is the son of Gaston Robbe-Grillet, owner of a small manufacturing business (himself the son of a school-teacher) and of Yvonne Canu Robbe-Grillet (the daughter of a navy petty-officer). He attended a Paris primary school and then lycées in Paris and Brest. In 1942 he passed the competitive entrance examination for the prestigious Institut National d'Agronomie. In common with many young men of his generation too young to fight in the campaign that preceded the fall of France in 1940, he found himself forcibly recruited to work for the Germans under the STO, or compulsory labor scheme. This obligation interrupted his studies and took him to Nuremberg in Germany, where he worked as a lathe operator in a factory producing Panther tanks from July 1943 to August 1944. On graduation in 1945 he joined...