Recommendations
Books Like Portrait d'un inconnu by Nathalie Sarraute
Books for readers who loved the anti-novel and Sarraute's obsessive narrator who cannot resolve people into characters
Portrait d'un inconnu (1948) is the 'anti-novel' prefaced by Sartre — a narrator who cannot see an old man and his daughter as stable characters, only as tropisms. These 8 books share its interest in the impossibility of knowing another person, its neurotic obsessional narrator, and its refusal of the psychological closure that conventional fiction provides.
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Buy on AmazonMartereau
by Nathalie Sarraute
The companion follow-up — the same narrator, the same obsessive inability to resolve another person into a stable character, this time focused on the apparently solid Martereau; read as the direct continuation.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Tropismes
by Nathalie Sarraute
The founding document — the method in its most concentrated form; read before Portrait d'un inconnu to understand what Sarraute is extending into the longer form.
- 3Buy on Amazon
Le Planétarium
by Nathalie Sarraute
The most novelistic Sarraute — the method distributed across an ensemble, and the most accessible entry into the full Sarraute project.
- 4
Buy on AmazonThe Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A narrator who moves through a world that cannot be stabilised into comprehensible social reality — Ishiguro's most Sarraute-like novel, in which the conventions of the social novel are used to reveal their own inadequacy.
- 5
Buy on AmazonPale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov
Kinbote's commentary on Shade's poem — a portrait of a man unknown from the perspective of a narrator whose obsession tells us more about himself than about Shade, exactly the structure of Portrait d'un inconnu.
- 6
Buy on AmazonBeing and Nothingness
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre wrote the preface; his philosophy of the other — the way the other's gaze constitutes the self — is the philosophical background to Sarraute's tropistic vision; reading them together illuminates both.
- 7
Buy on AmazonModerato cantabile
by Marguerite Duras
The companion minimal French novel — Duras's Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin construct a portrait of the murdered couple in the same way that Portrait d'un inconnu's narrator constructs a portrait of the old man and his daughter: from the outside, obsessively, without resolution.
- 8Buy on Amazon
The Interrogation
by J.M.G. Le Clézio
Le Clézio's first novel — a young man walking through a city, unable to stabilise his perception of the social world around him, in the direct tradition of the anti-novel that Sarraute and Sartre defined.
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