Sarraute

Barbara Wright (1915 – 2009), two-time winner of the Scott Moncrieff award, translator of Queneau, Sarraute, Tzara, Jarry and others, died in March.

Deaths in the extended family (pt. 1) 2009

By a generation of French readers schooled in the works of Robbe-Grillet, Roussel, Federman, Sarraute, Sollers, Pinget and Butor, and the films of Godard and Resnais, such an approach would be almost intuitively understood.

Ballardian » ‘Le passé composé de J. G. Ballard’: JGB on Empire of the Sun 2009

Barbara Wright (1915 – 2009), two-time winner of the Scott Moncrieff award, translator of Queneau, Sarraute, Tzara, Jarry and others, died in March.

A Different Stripe: 2009

Sarraute shows language to be a powerful weapon; not merely names and nouns, but even pronouns can have petrifying effects: if “we” produces a cosy togetherness for “us,” it chills the excluded, while a plural “you” can seem to convict and irrevocably sentence.

Sarraute, Nathalie. 2009

For Sarraute, personality is a fundamentally artificial invention, and the very notion of “character” is called in question.

Sarraute, Nathalie. 2009

When asked about her political stance, Sarraute described herself as having political commitments as a citizen, but not as a writer.

Sarraute, Nathalie. 2009

A Russian Jew by birth, French by education and European by culture, Sarraute was always intensely aware of and resistant to the reductive powers of categorizing language: she refused to be described as a “woman writer,” and would equally refuse the label “Jewish writer.”

Sarraute, Nathalie. 2009

In Childhood, Sarraute uncovers the tropisms underlying various fragments of her own childhood memories, creating, in the process, at the age of eighty-five, her first bestseller.

Sarraute, Nathalie. 2009

Growing up in Paris in the highly cultured milieu of her free-thinking father, Sarraute never felt any sense of difference in status between men and women, and Jewishness was never an issue.

Sarraute, Nathalie. 2009

In the works that followed, Sarraute showed the tropisms at work in the wider scope of the novel form, creating slow-motion close-ups that dramatize and enormously enlarge — often with comic effect — the virtual dramas latent in ephemeral flickers of feeling.

Sarraute, Nathalie. 2009