Portrait d'un inconnu Reading Order

Portrait d'un inconnu (Portrait of a Man Unknown, 1948) by Nathalie Sarraute was published with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre who called it an 'anti-novel' — a work that uses the apparatus of the novel in order to subvert it, to reveal the machinery of conventional characterisation as a falsification of the actual texture of human experience. The unnamed narrator of Portrait d'un inconnu is obsessed with an old man and his daughter who live in his building — not with their lives as stories to be understood but with the tropisms, the micro-movements of attraction and repulsion, that pass between them. He cannot fully see what he sees; his perception is constantly qualified, withdrawn, restarted. The old man and his daughter are not characters in the sense of individuals with stable identities: they are sites of tropistic pressure, and the novel's drama is the drama of an attempt to read interiority that resists being read. Portrait d'un inconnu is a harder book than Tropismes — longer, more sustained, requiring more patience — but it is also more fully worked out as a vision of what fiction might do if it refused to organise human beings into characters with stable identities, coherent motivations, and comprehensible stories. Sarraute's preoccupation throughout is with the gap between what people think they know about each other and the actual pressure of the other's presence that precedes and escapes all knowing.