Synopses & Reviews
Hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Paul Sartre, 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.
Review
"Sarraute shows us in small, immediate moves how a person can be pushed toward marriage or murder." Jean Genet
Review
"Sarraute has cracked open the 'smooth and hard' surface of traditional characters in order to discover the endless vibrations of moods and sentiments, the tremors of a never-ending series of earthquakes in the microcosm of the self." The New Yorker
Review
"Reading Sarraute is like watching a news broadcast in which the anchorman speaks trivialities and bromides while the crawl below sends word of sieges and conflagrations in a slowly unwinding procession." Hannah Arendt The New York Review of Books
Review
"--something like 'prose poems'--as Sarraute calls them that-- is her form! Her texture is anti-novelistic, though she's decided to write 'novels' and launched an important critique of the novel on the basis of her method." Susan Sontag
Synopsis
Nathalie Sarraute's stunning debut--vignettes of "inner movements"--foreshadowed the rise of the nouveau roman.