Paris Review - Nathalie Sarraute, The Art of Fiction No. 115
Nathalie Sarraute was eighty-three when she published her first best-seller, Childhood. Unlike her previous books, it was an autobiographical work. Memories from her Russian and French childhood emerge from a word or a gesture recalled, burn brightly for a moment, and fade. Quietly the mosaic takes shape, in her compassionate regard for the parents whose early divorce divided her love. She was born in 1900 in Ivanovo, near Moscow. Her first book, Tropisms, a collection of brief texts that appeared in 1939, marked a fresh direction in French literature. She describes tropisms as the “interior movements that precede and prepare our words and actions, at the limits of our consciousness.” They happen in an instant, and apprehending them in the rush of human interactions demands painstaking attention. Tropisms became the key to all her subsequent work. Highly respected in France, Sarraute has been translated into twenty-four languages; her fourteen books, including eight novels, most of whi
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