The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 27 May 2001
by Nathalie Sarraute
This is a remarkable and difficult book. It was one of Sarraute's last works (published after an edition of her "complete works"), and it is permeated with the weight of many years of language and its hidden meanings. It is a "novel", but in lacks the conventional driving plot one expects in a novel. Here, language is the main protagonist, and the author explores the various hidden meanings behind everyday speech. There are twenty chapters, each progressively more complex than the last, but each beginning with a deceptively simple proposition. Sarraute, a proponent, along with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and others, of the "new novel", tears away layers of meaning as she would layers from an onion. Reading her style can be frustrating. This book may require a couple times through, page by page, to reveal the structure of Sarraute's masterful writing. Narrators shift, meaning is put into words or phrases where none seemed to be from the start. One imagines the narrators to be eminently frustrating people to talk to. Yet there are entertaining passages to which anyone who has ever been frustrated by a forgotten word could relate. In the end, there is a sinister darkness shooting through the whole book. Hidden in our words (hidden by our words), are the darker layers and motives of our personalities. Sarraute reveals some of this, but the exploration seems only to have begun.
(There is a good introduction to the 1997 Braziller edition of this book, by the translator, Barbara Wright. She helps reveal why a reader may benefit from reading this book in its original French (Ici). But don't read the last page of this introduction, for it reveals too much.)
Also by Sarraute: [Childhood]