Le Planétarium Reading Order

Le Planétarium (The Planetarium, 1959) by Nathalie Sarraute is the novel in which the Sarraute method achieved its fullest early expression and its broadest readability. Where the earlier works (Tropismes, Portrait d'un inconnu, Martereau) are centred on an obsessional unnamed narrator, Le Planétarium distributes its tropistic observation across an ensemble of characters — a young couple, their respective families, and the elderly aunt from whom the young man Alain wants to inherit her apartment — and renders all of them from the inside, each in turn experiencing the pressure of the others' presence as tropism. The plot is minimal: Alain and his wife Gisèle want to take the apartment from Alain's Aunt Berthe; a famous writer named Germaine Lemaire exercises a powerful and ambiguous influence over Alain; minor social dramas of furniture, decoration, and snobbery play out against the tropistic background. But the novel's real subject is the way social life — the life of families, ambitions, literary coteries, class aspiration — is carried not in events but in the micro-movements of pressure and response that the visible social surface both conceals and expresses. Le Planétarium is Sarraute's most novelistic work and the one most recommended to readers approaching her for the first time via the longer form.