Volume 20, Number 6 · April 19, 1973
What's Going On Upstairs?
By John Weightman
Do You Hear Them?
by Nathalie Sarraute, translated by Maria Jolas
Braziller, 147 pp., $5.95
There has been a tendency lately in France to say that, after all, Mme Sarraute is not a 'New Novelist,' since she is interested in psychological substance rather than in word-games. She clearly holds the old-fashioned view that 'reality' is a pre-existing something that language tries despairingly to express. Whereas some members of the 'New Novel' group take language itself as a kind of absolute medium to be solipsistically shuffled and reshuffled like a pack of cards, she, on the contrary, gives the impression of being up to her ears in the quagmire of the inarticulate, from which she is transmitting fragmentary, repetitive, and insistent messages, in the hope that communication will not prove entirely impossible. Her characteristic punctuation device is points de suspension, the three dots…, which she uses ten, twenty, or thirty times on a given page, and which rat-tat-tat like SOS signals.
Review, 2193 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |