Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on 25 March 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat No.

The reader must slowly piece together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy, for example, in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions, a method that resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations.

The Voyeur relates the story of Mathias, a traveling watch salesman who returns to the island of his youth with a desperate objective.

In Robbe-Grillet's account of the novel the absent narrator, a jealous husband, silently observes the interactions of his wife (referred to only as "A...") and a neighbour, Franck.

The silent narrator who never names himself (his presence is merely implied, e.g. by the number of place settings at the dinner table or deck chairs on the verandah) is extremely suspicious that A... is having an affair with Franck.

Over the course of the novel the main character looks through his blinds repeatedly in different scenes, the 'jalousie' he looks out to the world that mutates ever so slightly each time.

In 1984 he published what he described as an intentionally traditional autobiography, entitled Le Miroir qui revient, translated into English as Ghosts in the Mirror by Jo Levy (1988).

The film was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and won the Golden Lion when it came out in 1961.

Robbe-Grillet launched a career as a writer-director of a series of cerebral and often sexually provocative feature films that explored similar themes to those in his literary work (e.g. Voyeurism, The Body as Text, The 'Double').

Subsequently, more than a decade passed before Robbe-Grillet got behind the lens again, this time filming a mystery thriller on a small Greek island with Fred Ward starring as the confused Frank in Un bruit qui rend fou (A Maddening Noise, aka: The Blue Villa) (1995).

The book is referred to as a "roman" (novel) and is illustrated with 77 paintings by Magritte interspersed with discourse written by Robbe-Grillet.

[8] In 1981, Robbe-Grillet and Yvone Lenard published Le Rendez-vous (The Meeting) in the United States as a textbook for intermediary French courses that included an original novel and grammar exercises.

[9] As Trinity College professor Sara Kippur explains, "As a language-learning tool, Le rendez-vous advanced a systematic approach that introduced students to increasing complex verb tenses and grammatical constructions.

The text of Djinn was identical to that of Le Rendez-vous absent the grammar exercise and with the addition of the prologue and epilogue.