Nathalie Sarraute facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Nathalie Sarraute
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Nathalie Sarraute (c. 1983)
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Natalia Ilinichna Tcherniak
18 July 1900 Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Russian Empire (now Russia)
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| Died | 19 October 1999 (aged 99) Paris, France
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Nathalie Sarraute (born Natalia Ilinichna Tcherniak; July 18, 1900 – October 19, 1999) was a famous French writer and lawyer. She is known for her unique writing style and for being a key figure in a literary movement called the "nouveau roman" (new novel).
About Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute was born in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a city in Russia, about 300 kilometers northeast of Moscow. Her mother, Pauline, was a writer, and her father, Ilya, was a chemist. Nathalie came from a Russian Jewish family. After her parents divorced, she spent her childhood moving between France and Russia. In 1909, she moved to Paris, France, with her father.
Nathalie was a very bright student. She studied law and literature at the well-known Sorbonne in Paris. She especially loved modern literature and was inspired by writers like Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. Later, she also studied history at Oxford University in England and sociology in Berlin, Germany. After all her studies, she became a lawyer in France in 1926.
In 1925, she married Raymond Sarraute, who was also a lawyer. They had three daughters together. In 1932, Nathalie wrote her first book, Tropismes. This book was a collection of short stories and memories that showed her unique writing style. It was published in 1939, but World War II made it hard for the book to become popular.
During World War II, because Nathalie was Jewish, she was not allowed to work as a lawyer due to unfair laws at the time. She faced many difficulties during this period. Nathalie Sarraute lived a long life and passed away in Paris, France, when she was 99 years old. Her daughter, Claude Sarraute, became a journalist.
Her Writing Career
Nathalie Sarraute decided to focus completely on writing. One of her most important books was Portrait of a Man Unknown, published in 1948. The famous writer Jean-Paul Sartre praised this book and even called it an "anti-novel," meaning it went against traditional ways of writing novels. Even with such high praise, only people deeply involved in literature noticed her early works.
Sarraute's essay The Age of Suspicion (L'Ère du soupçon), written in 1956, became a key text for a new way of writing called the nouveau roman (new novel) movement. This movement, which included writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, and Marguerite Duras, wanted to change how stories were told. They focused less on traditional characters and plots.
In 1963, Nathalie Sarraute won the Prix international de littérature for her novel The Golden Fruits. This award helped her become much more well-known. That same year, she also started writing plays. She wrote six plays in total, including Le Silence (1963) and Le Mensonge (1965). As she became more famous, she was invited to speak at many literary events in France and other countries.
Nathalie Sarraute's books, such as Between Life and Death (1968) and The Use of Speech (1980), have been translated into more than 30 languages. Her writing style was often called "difficult" because it was experimental. She liked to explore people's inner thoughts and feelings, rather than telling a straightforward story. For example, her book The Golden Fruits is made up entirely of internal thoughts. Her novel The Planetarium (1959) is about a young man's strong desire to move into his aunt's apartment. Sarraute's stories often show different viewpoints, making the reader think about how we understand reality.
While her novels could be challenging, her memoir Childhood is considered an easier read. She wrote this autobiography when she was over eighty years old. In it, she explores how difficult it can be to remember the past accurately. In the 1980s, Childhood was even turned into a play on Broadway, starring the actress Glenn Close. The ideas about memory that Sarraute explored in her autobiography also appeared in her last novel, Here, published in 1995. In this book, she looked at big questions about how reality is always changing for individuals and society.
The filmmaker Agnès Varda dedicated her 1985 movie Sans toit ni loi (Vagabonde) to Nathalie Sarraute.
See also
In Spanish: Nathalie Sarraute para niños
- Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, a list which includes Tropisms
