Volume 31, Number 16 · October 25, 1984
What Nathalie Knew
By Frank Kermode
Childhood
by Nathalie Sarraute, translated by Barbara Wright. in consultation with the author
Braziller, 246 pp., $14.95
Even if you stay away from all the books that nowadays offer you theories of it, autobiography appears to have become almost impossibly difficult to write. The old assumption that there were things back there to be remembered and set down in a reasonably coherent fashion has withered; infancy in particular has no official history, hardly even an official myth. Even in the psychoanalytic consulting room it is no longer pretended that the topics presenting themselves belong to a real past that can be recollected, rather than to the here and now; one has not so much a past as a transference.
Review, 2889 words
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