Pearls series

Tropisms broke molds and transformed possibilities in French literature. More elemental than experimental, it remains in a class by itself. It’s not merely the very first of the New Novels, but their original inspiration, and then again their outstanding exception, because Tropisms was not written to prove a point: it was written in the pure and delirious pursuit of truth, true moments, too fleeting and too fragile for the contrivance of plot. This book, elegant, simple, but mysterious, is a classic of French letters.

Rachel Kushner

Nathalie Sarraute’s stunning debut–vignettes of inner movements–foreshadowed the rise of the Nouveau Roman

Tropisms

by Nathalie Sarraute

Translated from French by Maria Jolas

Hailed as a masterpiece by Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tropisms 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.

Paperback(published Nov, 10 2015)

ISBN
9780811222761
Price US
10.95
Price CN
12.95
Trim Size
4 x 7
Page Count
96

Ebook(published Nov, 10 2015)

ISBN
9780811222778

Tropisms broke molds and transformed possibilities in French literature. More elemental than experimental, it remains in a class by itself. It’s not merely the very first of the New Novels, but their original inspiration, and then again their outstanding exception, because Tropisms was not written to prove a point: it was written in the pure and delirious pursuit of truth, true moments, too fleeting and too fragile for the contrivance of plot. This book, elegant, simple, but mysterious, is a classic of French letters.

Rachel Kushner

Witty and formally exact.

The Guardian

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.

Juan Vidal, NPR Best Books of 2015

The book has such intensity that it feels imperative…her work is immersive and consuming; when you look up from the page you see and feel the world differently.

Pasha Malla, The Globe and Mail

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.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Paris Review

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.

Susan Sontag

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.

James Gibbons, BOOKFORUM

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.

Hannah Arendt, The New York Review of Books

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

The New Yorker