A review by lee_foust
Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute

5.0

Finally got around to re-reading this book, which has left an indelible mark on me and my writing. It's been with me since the very beginning of my serious attempt at a writing career. My awareness of Tropisms and its author Nathalie Sarraute must have come in the Nouveau Roman course I took in college, taught by Surrealist great Nanos Valeoritis at San Francisco state University in the early '80s. For whatever reason, I didn't then read it, but I owned a copy and thus it ended up in my shoulder bag when I quit my job, sold pretty much everything I owned, and took off for Europe in 1986, dreaming of living something like the life Henry Miller describes in Quiet Days in Cliche.

I don't exactly recall when I read it--perhaps even in the airport or on the plane to Brussels, or later in Paris, or perhaps still later in Rome, where I settled in that summer to write my first novel. But I do remember vividly its impact, it's uniqueness, the inspiration and feeling of the freedom to experiment myself by writing briefly and to the heart of things that these short, abstract narratives offered me as I began penning the fragments of my own endless satori as I traveled, saw the history I'd dreampt of back in the USA, and began collecting those fragments and a longer narrative together into my first novel Inbetween.

Now, having read I believe five later Sarraute novels, as well as her essays on novel writing, my understanding of her project is perhaps more clear, but the sheer beauty and impact of these short narratives, these Joycean epiphanies if you will, devoid of character (in the traditional sense) or plot, is still largely the same. Yes, there is a kinship here with Joyce's concept of that inner shift, that moment in which the essence of a character is revealed to others or themselves, even if Sarraute has gone him one step further by stripping away most of the exposition, description, background, and the small narrative that make the Dubliners stories still partially resemble the classic short story form.

True to the saying that less is more, I find the raw impact here even greater, at times, than the also awesome beauty of Joyce's tales. For me this is an essential fiction. I should re-read it far more often than I do. It's just exquisite.

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I gave this another reread as I just presented it to students, along with Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima, Mon Amour in my Literature and Gender course. As non-literature majors all they were a bit mystified, but I hope to have peaked their interest. It appears I will always love and return to this book as a wonderful re-imagining of what literature could be.