Recommendations
Books Like Tropismes by Nathalie Sarraute
Fiction that reaches below the surface of social life
Tropismes is the founding text of a literary project to make visible the barely perceptible psychological movements — the sub-conversation — beneath ordinary social interaction. These novels share that same orientation toward depth beneath the social surface.
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Buy on AmazonL'Ère du soupçon
by Nathalie Sarraute
The Age of Suspicion — Sarraute's theoretical essays explaining the sub-conversation and the nouveau roman; the clearest account of what Tropismes is doing
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Buy on AmazonPortrait of a Man Unknown
by Nathalie Sarraute
Sarraute's first novel — a narrator observing a father and daughter through the lens of the sub-conversation; the extended novelistic form of the Tropismes project
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Buy on AmazonThe Waves
by Virginia Woolf
The British modernist model that Sarraute acknowledges — six voices speaking their interior lives across the arc of a life; the most direct predecessor to Tropismes
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Buy on AmazonMrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
The stream-of-consciousness rendering of a London day through multiple interior lives — Woolf's technique of the barely perceptible is the model Sarraute develops
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Buy on AmazonLes Gommes
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The other founding text of the nouveau roman — Robbe-Grillet's opposite approach: pure surface rather than deep sub-conversation; essential counterpart to Tropismes
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Buy on AmazonChildhood
by Nathalie Sarraute
Sarraute's late autobiographical novel — two voices interrogating her own childhood memories; her most accessible book and the fullest development of the Tropismes project
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The Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's underground man — the model for the self-dividing consciousness that Sarraute develops as the sub-conversation; the Russian origin of her literary psychology
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Buy on AmazonModerato cantabile
by Marguerite Duras
Duras's elliptical investigation of erotic obsession — the same orientation toward what cannot be said directly that characterizes Sarraute's tropisms
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