Nathalie Sarraute
France
Tiny, hovering, almost abstract sentences that catch feeling a half-second before it hardens into speech or cliché.
Sarraute was born in Russia to a Jewish family that split apart when she was small; she shuttled between a father in Paris and a mother in St. Petersburg before settling permanently in France as a child. She trained and practiced as a lawyer through her twenties and thirties, writing in stolen hours, and published her first book, Tropisms, in 1939 to near-total silence; it took two decades and a changed literary climate for its short, unnerving psychological fragments to be recognized as prophetic.
By the late 1950s she was grouped with Robbe-Grillet and others as a founder of the nouveau roman, dissolving plot and character into pure sub-verbal sensation in novels like The Planetarium. She kept writing into her nineties, including the autobiographical Childhood, and died in Paris in 1999 at ninety-nine.
Their books in the atlas
- 1939
TropismsLvl 7modernist - 1959
The PlanetariumLvl 7modernist
Meanwhile, elsewhere
If you like Sarraute, try
1913–2005Claude SimonFranceshared movement: The Nouveau Roman · kindred genres: modernist · both write in French
1871–1922Marcel ProustFrancekindred genres: modernist, psychological novel · both write in French · neighboring movements
1906–1989Samuel BeckettIreland / Francekindred genres: modernist, psychological novel · both write in French · neighboring movements
1922–2008Alain Robbe-GrilletFranceshared movement: The Nouveau Roman · kindred genres: psychological novel · both write in French
1908–1986Simone de BeauvoirFrancekindred genres: psychological novel · both write in French · neighboring movements
1873–1939Ford Madox FordEnglandkindred genres: modernist, psychological novel · neighboring movements · same region & era