Martereau Reading Order

Martereau (1953) by Nathalie Sarraute is the third of her major works and the second of her full-length novels, taking the technique established in Portrait d'un inconnu and extending it around a new obsessional relationship. The narrator — again unnamed, again neurotic, again unable to distinguish between what is actually happening and what he is projecting — lives with his uncle and aunt and becomes obsessed with Martereau, a solid, confident acquaintance of his uncle who seems to embody everything the narrator lacks: stability, confidence, a clear and consistent social self. The uncle asks Martereau to help him purchase a property (to conceal the transaction from the tax authorities), and the narrator becomes increasingly convinced that Martereau is not what he appears — that beneath the solid social surface there is a manipulator, a hypocrite, a different person entirely. The novel's drama is the drama of the narrator's inability to maintain a stable image of Martereau: he oscillates between idealisation and suspicion, between seeing Martereau as the embodiment of healthy sociality and seeing him as its sophisticated deceiver. Sarraute uses this oscillation to explore what is perhaps her central preoccupation: the impossibility of knowing another person, the gap between the social performance and the interior tropism that performance conceals. Martereau is more accessible than the later more radical Sarraute novels, and it is a very good second step after Portrait d'un inconnu.