The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 12 November 2008
by Nathalie Sarraute
Psychologists tell us that childhood is the time in our lives where much, if not all, of our personality is assembled. Childhood is when we demonstrate our inclinations toward creativity or leadership. Or to violence. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. And why do middle-aged people still feel psychologically like they're seventeen? Why do some people seem to have lived their glory days only in high school? Childhood is a troubled and wondrous landscape that is perpetually explored in our memories as well as in the works of social scientists and psychologists. And on and on. There's much that follows us from childhood throughout our lives. It is the source of much memoir writing these days. Here is another memoir, by French author Nathalie Sarraute, who evoked her memories when she was in her eighties (she died in 1999 at the age of 99). Sarraute was a member of a loosely-knit group of writers known as the nouveau roman who, in the middle of the 20th century, broke some of the molds of conventional fiction writing. (This culminated when one such author, Claude Simon, won the Nobel Prize in 1985.) Sarraute was a late-comer to writing but she wrote vivid novels that express a passion for language and its ability to bend and twist in new ways. This memoir is a kind of conversation with herself, her attempt to call up childhood memories without allowing her later experiences color her interpretation of them. There are moments in which the author catches herself veering into the conventional excesses of memoir, primarily that of unconsciously attributing adult feelings and thoughts to a child. Sarraute grew up the child of a divorced Russian family. She shuttled back and forth between mother and father, Petersburg and Paris, in the years before and after the Russian Revolution. She evokes characters, times and places with a fragmentary and episodic style that reflects the patchiness of memory. And she is as honest as she can be about the feelings she experienced seven decades before she is writing. She was given one of the most brutal choices a child can be forced to make, to chose between living with mother or with father. Clearly, that separation is one of the key features of her early years. Perhaps significantly, though, we see the early evolution of Sarraute's writerly talents and her enduring passion for language. And then, abruptly, as she reaches her teenaged years, she stops. It's a potent and honest journey.
Also by Sarraute: [Here]