Recommendations
Books Like Martereau by Nathalie Sarraute
Books for readers who loved the obsessive narrator and Sarraute's portrait of social confidence from the inside of self-doubt
Martereau (1953) is Sarraute's most accessible early novel — the neurotic narrator fascinated by the apparently solid Martereau, unable to decide whether the confidence is real or a performance. These 8 books share its obsessional social perception, its portrait of the person who cannot see other people as simple, and its study of the gap between social performance and tropistic reality.
- 1
Buy on AmazonPortrait d'un inconnu
by Nathalie Sarraute
The direct predecessor — the same narrator, the same method, the founding anti-novel that Martereau continues and develops; read first if you want the series in order.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Tropismes
by Nathalie Sarraute
The founding document in miniature — read before Martereau for the method in its most concentrated form.
- 3Buy on Amazon
Le Planétarium
by Nathalie Sarraute
The next Sarraute novel — more polyphonic and more openly novelistic, the step forward from Martereau in the development of the Sarraute method.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Talented Mr. Ripley
by Patricia Highsmith
Tom Ripley's obsession with Dickie Greenleaf — the thriller version of the same fascination with a person who seems to embody a social ease the narrator cannot access; Highsmith's Ripley is the violent resolution of the Sarraute narrator's impasse.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens's portrait of himself as a great butler — the same gap between a social performance (in this case the narrator's own) and the interior tropism it conceals, observed with the same precision as Sarraute but with more pathos.
- 6
Buy on AmazonA Hero of Our Time
by Mikhail Lermontov
Pechorin observed from multiple perspectives — the same problem of reading another person who refuses to be fully known, the Russian nineteenth-century predecessor to the impossible portrait that Sarraute's narrator attempts.
- 7
Buy on AmazonStoner
by John Williams
A man who cannot perform the social self that the world expects of him — Williams's portrait of William Stoner's interior life has the same quality of attention to the gap between social performance and inner reality that makes Martereau so acute.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Stranger
by Albert Camus
Meursault's radical inability to perform the emotional responses that social life requires — the companion French novel of social non-performance, showing what the same tropistic detachment looks like when it becomes a moral and existential position rather than a neurotic one.
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