(Hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, ...)
Hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tropisms is considered one of the defining texts of the nouveau roman movement. Nathalie Sarraute has defined her work as the "movements that are hidden under the commonplace, harmless instances of our everyday lives." Like figures in a grainy photograph, Sarraute’s characters are blurred and shadowy, while her narrative never develops beyond a stressed moment. Instead, Sarraute brilliantly finds and elaborates subtle details - when a relationship changes, when we fall slightly deeper into love, or when something innocent tilts to the smallest degree toward suspicion.
(Nathalie Sarraute probes deeply into the nature of human ...)
Nathalie Sarraute probes deeply into the nature of human relationships through her depiction of an elderly father and his spinster daughter. In his preface to Portrait of a Man Unknown, Jean-Paul Sartre applauded Sarraute for writing an "anti-novel," one that resists the traditional premises of plot and character. The narrator, a neurotic neighbor obsessed with the pair, shows the persistence of a sleuth, taking every opportunity to snoop and eavesdrop. He follows the couple's every step, awaiting the final explosion: the ultimate confrontation between the two characters over money necessary for the daughter's medical needs.
(Childhood is constructed as a dialogue between Sarraute a...)
Childhood is constructed as a dialogue between Sarraute and her memory. Sarraute gently interrogates her interlocutor in search of her own intentions, more precise accuracy, and indeed, the truth. Her relationships with her mother in Russia and her stepmother in Paris are especially heartbreaking: long-gone actions are prodded and poked at by Sarraute until they yield some semblance of fact, imbuing these maternalistic interactions with new, deeper meaning. Each vignette is bristling with detail and shows the power of memory through prose by turns funny, sad, and poetic. Capturing the ambience of Paris and Russia in the earliest part of the twentieth century, while never giving up the lyrical style of Sarraute’s novels, this book has much to offer both memoir enthusiasts and fiction lovers.
(Considered one of the major French writers of our century...)
Considered one of the major French writers of our century, Nathalie Sarraute is the author of several novels, plays, and essays, as well as of Childhood, her autobiography. A pioneer of the nouveau roman (or new novel), a literary movement that sought to free the novel from the confines of plot, characterization, and time, she was recently honored by the presentation of her complete works in the prestigious Pleiade series (other authors in the series include Honore de Balzac, Ernest Hemingway, and Franz Kafka).George Braziller is delighted to have been publishing all of Sarraute's work in America since 1958.
(The latest work by the distinguished French writer Nathal...)
The latest work by the distinguished French writer Nathalie Sarraute, Here recreates the frustration of attempting to recall a forgotten word. Just beyond the grasp of memory, the elusive name of a person, a tree, or of a well-known artist is pursued through the dialogues, repetitions, and silences of everyday speech. The struggle to remember brings out the many interpretations and misunderstandings caused by the simplest and most banal of phrases - a theme found throughout Sarraute's work. As in previous books, she explores the minute, almost imperceptible responses to spoken words and thoughts, describing them with a minimum of concrete or social context. Although highly abstract, Here is surprisingly sensual in its analogies: intimidating laughter from the ever-present, threatening crowd is frantically mopped up with a sponge and a bucket of disinfectant; the words of subdued politeness are like low-fat foods lacking in real nourishment; the suggestion of obscure menace is experienced as a whiff of cheap make-up.
Nathalie Sarraute was a French lawyer and writer. She is regarded as one of the major French novelists of the twentieth century.
Background
Nathalie Sarraute was born on July 18, 1900 in Ivanovo (then Ivanovo-Voznesensk), Russian Federation. She was a daughter of Ilya Tcherniak, a doctor of sciences and a chemical engineer, and Pauline Chatounovski, a writer, who published novels under the pseudonym of Vikhrovski.
After her parents divorced in 1902, her early childhood was divided between her mother and father, both of whom remarried, and between France and Russia. From the age of eight, she lived in Paris with her father, whose political opinions had made it difficult for him to remain in Russia.
Education
On completing her schooling at the Lycée Fénelon, Nathalie Sarraute received a degree in English from the Sorbonne (1920), spent a year studying history at Oxford University (1921) and six months studying philosophy and sociology at the University of Berlin (1921–1922). In 1925 she gained a law degree from the University of Paris, Sorbonne.
From 1926 to 1939 Nathalie Sarraute was a member of the French bar, until she became a full-time writer. In 1932 and 1933 Sarraute composed two sketches described by some as prose poems, by others as experimental fiction. She titled these pieces Tropismes (Tropisms), and they were subsequently incorporated into her first book, which bore the same title and was published in 1939, receiving only one review.
After the war, dedicating herself entirely to writing, she became friends with Sartre, who offered to write a preface for her first novel, Portrait of a Man Unknown (1948), which he famously described as "an antinovel that reads like a detective story". In her second novel, Martereau (1953), Sarraute used the natural intrigue of an extended family to explore her tropisms. The book sold few copies, but it sufficed to identify her as a ''new novelist.'' Just three years later, when she published The Age of Suspicion, this book of essays about her approach to literature was presented to the public as ''the first theoretical manifestation of the Nouveau Roman school.''
After she published ''The Planetarium'' in 1959, it would take more than a decade for her to complete her next three novels - The Golden Fruits (1963), Between Life and Death (1968) and Do You Hear Them? (1972) - which had in common a complex and humorous self-criticism of her own creative process hidden inside a novel. In her 1983 autobiographical work, Childhood, however, she showed herself, at least how she remembered her turbulent first twelve years of life. You Don't Love Yourself, published in 1990, is a dialogue about self-hate in which, as often is the case, there is a counterpoint between language and emotion.
In 1995 her book Here was published in France and in 1997 in the United States. In September 1997, at the age of 97, she published Ouvrez (Open), a 130-page book in which she denounced the impoverishment of the French language.
During the German occupation of France, Nathalie Sarraute joined a resistance group formed by Jean-Paul Sartre and others and spent long periods using false papers. In 1960 she was a signatory on the Manifesto of the 121, protesting against French state policy towards Algeria. When asked about her political stance, Sarraute described herself as having political commitments as a citizen, but not as a writer.
Connections
In 1925 Nathalie Sarraute married Raymond Sarraute. In 1985 he died. The couple had three daughters, Claude, Anne and Dominique.