Nathalie Sarraute

Witty and formally exact.

This collection of vignettes, made up of short scenes and anecdotes, reads like quiet prose poems that stay with the reader. Translated by Maria Jolas, Tropisms is a masterpiece, short but powerful in every sense.

It was Sarraute who started the denunciation of ‘character’ in the Balzacian sense, and tried to find the inner impulses of the hero at the moment he endeavors to express himself. What she calls ‘tropisms’ are the tiny imperceptible interactions between people—the little games of aggression and retreat, the miniscule battles that constitute the present state of the psyche.

Tropisms—something like ‘prose poems’—as Sarraute calls them that—this 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.

Reading Sarraute is like watching a news broadcast in which the anchorman speaks trivilaties and bromides while the crawl below sends word of seiges and conflagrations in a slowly unwinding procession.

Sarraute has cracked open the ‘smooth and hard’ surface of the 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.

Sarraute shows us in small immediate moves how a person can be pushed toward marriage or murder.