Two books by Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died this February and is one of my favorite stylists. These are great books for reading on trains.
Jealousy published in 1957, tells the story of the possible infidelities of the wife of the master of a South American banana plantation from the peculiar point of view of an undescribed narrator, who presumably is the never-named husband. It is a portrait of madness and complete obssession, brief and structured like a diamond. The wife, A., may or may not be sharing indiscretions with a neighbor, Franck; however the clues offered by the invisible husband, including mercilessly counting all the banana plants over and over, and finding centipedes everywhere, are suggestive of a deep and fundamental terror.
The Erasers is a detective story - a murder mystery - but the murder may not have been committed yet, or it may have occurred on a blank or missing page of the book itself. The Erasers seems to unfold as the genesis of the perfect Oswaldian existential "patsy".
From wikipedia:
His writing style has been described as "realist" or "phenomenological" (in the Heideggerian sense) or "a theory of pure surface." Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace the psychology and interiority of the character. Instead, one slowly pieces together the story and the emotional experience of jealousy in the repetition of descriptions, the attention to odd details, and the breaks in repetitions. Ironically, this method resembles the experience of psychoanalysis in which the deeper unconscious meanings are contained in the flow and disruptions of free associations. Timelines and plots are fractured and the resulting novel resembles the literary equivalent of a cubist painting. Yet his work is ultimately characterised by its ability to mean many things to many different people.
