Recommendations
Books Like Le Planétarium by Nathalie Sarraute
Books for readers who loved the ensemble tropisms and Sarraute's portrait of family, ambition, and literary life
Le Planétarium (1959) is Sarraute's most novelistic work — a polyphonic portrait of a young couple angling for their aunt's apartment, rendered through the tropistic interior of each character in turn. These 8 books share its ensemble comedy of social ambition, its study of the micro-politics of family, and its portrait of the literary world from the inside.
- 1Buy on Amazon
Tropismes
by Nathalie Sarraute
The founding document — the method at its most concentrated, the best preparation for Le Planétarium's extended polyphony.
- 2
Buy on AmazonLes Fruits d'or
by Nathalie Sarraute
The next Sarraute novel — the method taken to its most radical expression, tracking the rise and fall of a literary reputation; the natural next step from Le Planétarium.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
A young man inserted into a wealthy English family — the same ensemble portrait of social ambition and the micro-politics of class aspiration, rendered from the inside of each position.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
A family novel rendered through the interior life of each member in turn — the American descendant of the polyphonic technique Sarraute pioneers in Le Planétarium, with the same comedy of social aspiration and family conflict.
- 5
Buy on AmazonMiddlemarch
by George Eliot
The great predecessor in polyphonic ensemble fiction — Eliot's free indirect discourse moves through multiple consciousnesses in the same way Sarraute's tropistic observation does, and the concern with ambition, marriage, and social position is the same.
- 6
Buy on AmazonCousin Pons
by Honoré de Balzac
The Balzac novel about an old man and a collection — the family's waiting for an inheritance, the covert pressure of aspiration and resentment, which Sarraute turns into tropism in Le Planétarium.
- 7
Buy on AmazonThe Aspern Papers
by Henry James
A narrator manoeuvring around an old woman for access to something she owns — the Jamesian comedy of social manoeuvre and the suppressed violence of aspiration that Sarraute renders through tropism.
- 8
Buy on AmazonBonjour Tristesse
by Françoise Sagan
The contemporary French social comedy — where Sarraute renders social aspiration as tropism, Sagan renders it as amoral comedy, but both are about the violence that underlies the polished surface of bourgeois social life.
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