Childhood

Plot

Considered one of the major French writers of our century, Nathalie Sarraute is the author of several novels, plays, and essays, as well as of Childhood, her autobiography. A pioneer of the nouveau roman (or "new novel"), a literary movement that sought to free the novel from the confines of plot, characterization, and time, she was recently honored by the presentation of her complete works in the prestigious Pleiade series (other authors in the series include Honore de Balzac, Ernest Hemingway, and Franz Kafka).George Braziller is delighted to have been publishing all of Sarraute's work in America since 1958.

Reading Childhood is like watching a memory at work. Images and moments from Nathalie Sarraute's early years are presented in chronological order but without any attempt to fill in the gaps that are naturally present when a mind looks back ten, twenty, thirty years. What emerges is still a story: the childhood of a young girl living in the first half of the twentieth century who divides her time between her divorced parents in Russia and France. By dismissing the need for a cohesive narrative, Nathalie Sarraute gives her memories immediacy. Her search for truth brings in a second voice that interrupts, testing, reassuring, prompting, creating a dialogue. Childhood puts the reader in a child's place as she relives the ritual of cutting open the pages of a book, the love for a favorite doll, the pain of intentional and unintentional slights, the joy of creating a first story, and the confusion of being passed back and forth between two different sets of parents.