Rearranging the pieces of life

• Rachel Donadio appreciates Alain Robbe-Grillet in The New York Times.

Lame-ass headline aside ("He Was Nouveau When It Was New"... oh, NYT editors, you're so damn clever), it's a good overview of Robbe-Grillet's work as a writer. The later section of the piece examines the influence of Last Year at Marienbad, his '62 collaboration with Alain Resnais, which is well worth tracking down -- that is, if you have a taste for 60s-era arty-farty films. Marienbad (as well as Resnais' earlier film Hiroshima mon amour), is basically the modern template for the pretentious art film, but if you're game, there are few better pieces of willfully demanding art to surrender yourself to.

A dreamlike, fragmented narrative, “Last Year at Marienbad” opened in New York in 1962. The style, “with its use of glamorous, glazed-looking actors framed in mannerist poses within the glittering, implicitly decadent mirrored salons of a luxe European hotel, may no longer dazzle audiences that have seen it cribbed (and spoofed) by countless perfume ads and rock videos,” Mark Harris wrote in The New York Times last month. But its “nightmarishly looping, repetitive semi-narrative, drenched in incantatory voice-over and toxically discordant organ music, is as disturbing as ever and retains its power to frustrate anybody who hopes to shake loose some answers after 93 minutes.”

In an interview, P. Adams Sitney, a Princeton film professor, called the film “an extremely abstract version” of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” in which a woman “disappears and maybe dies and yet transmographies into the land of the Nouveau Roman.” In his view, “the combination of Robbe-Grillet’s literary prestige and the innovative nature of ‘Marienbad’ was perfect for that moment in the history of taste.”

The rarest of the rare

• Rachel Donadio profiles rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz in The New York Times.

A glass vitrine held an exceedingly rare manuscript by one of the most famous American writers of the 20th century. Typed on yellow paper with a celebrated editor’s pencil marks in the margins, it offered a never-before-seen view of the writer’s creative process. When my jaw dropped, Horowitz quickly requested that the item be struck from the record and the author kept anonymous. But wasn’t it showcased in plain sight, begging for attention? No, he insisted, his office was private. This too seems part of the Horowitz approach, at once mystifying and demystifying the material. Like a born politician, he sometimes avoids direct answers and tends toward long, upbeat digressions. He frequently uses the word “blessedly” — collections he was blessedly able to acquire, people he was blessedly able to meet — and calls a long list of people his “very dear friend.”

However hyperbolic his style, Horowitz delivers the goods. Back in his conference room, he opened a plastic loose-leaf binder. There, in green ink on mottled cream-colored paper, was a letter Leonard Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf’s close friend and sometime lover, on March 28, 1941 — the day of the novelist’s suicide. “That one letter from Leonard to Vita touches on everything that interests us about Virginia,” Horowitz said excitedly. “The public and the private, the war and the writing — they go to the heart of the myth of Leonard as the caretaker.” The letter reached Horowitz through a member of the Sackville-West family. “Most of what we acquire comes directly from the original generators and/or the original recipients of the material generated by the writers,” he said. Half comes to him, half he seeks out. But it’s how he packages the material — turning, say, a newspaper clipping with a writer’s jottings in the margin into a significant cultural artifact — that sets him apart from less inventive dealers.