Here

by Nathalie Sarraute, Barbara Wright (Translator)

The latest work by the distinguished French writer Nathalie Sarraute, Here recreates the frustration of attempting to recall a forgotten word. Just beyond the grasp of memory, the elusive name of a person, a tree, or of a well-known artist is pursued through the dialogues, repetitions, and silences of everyday speech. The struggle to remember brings out the many interpretations and misunderstandings caused by the simplest and most banal of phrases - a theme found throughout Sarraute's work. As in previous books, she explores the minute, almost imperceptible responses to spoken words and thoughts, describing them with a minimum of concrete or social context. Although highly abstract, Here is surprisingly sensual in its intimidating laughter from the ever-present, threatening crowd is frantically mopped up with a sponge and a bucket of disinfectant; the words of subdued politeness are like low-fat foods lacking in real nourishment; the suggestion of obscure menace is experienced as a whiff of cheap make-up.

Genres: France, Fiction

165 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Nathalie Sarraute (July 18, 1900 in Ivanovo, Russia – October 19, 1999 in Paris, France) was a lawyer and a French writer of Russian-Jewish origin.

Sarraute was born Natalia/Natacha Tcherniak in Ivanovo (then known as Ivanovo-Voznesensk), 300 km north-east of Moscow in 1900 (although she frequently referred to the year of her birth as 1902, a date still cited in select reference works), and, following the divorce of her parents, spent her childhood shuttled between France and Russia. In 1909 she moved to Paris with her father. Sarraute studied law and literature at the prestigious Sorbonne, having a particular fondness for 20th century literature and the works of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, who greatly affected her conception of the novel, then later studied history at Oxford and sociology in Berlin, before passing the French bar exam (1926-1941) and becoming a lawyer.
In 1925, she married Raymond Sarraute, a fellow lawyer, with whom she would have three daughters. In 1932 she wrote her first book, Tropismes, a series of brief sketches and memories that set the tone for her entire oeuvre. The novel was first published in 1939, although the impact of World War II stunted its popularity. In 1941, Sarraute, who was Jewish, was released from her work as a lawyer as a result of Nazi law. During this time, she went into hiding and made arrangements to divorce her husband in an effort to protect him (although they would eventually stay together).
Nathalie Sarraute dies when she was ninety-nine years old. Her daughter, the journalist Claude Sarraute, was married to French Academician Jean-François Revel.

From Wikipedia

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

In Enfance, her memoir of childhood, written at the age of 83, the Russian/French writer, Nathalie Sarraute, remembers being labeled as a 'tragic' child because she didn't live with her mother. She wonders if that was the first time she'd felt trapped in a word, and concludes: I don’t remember it happening to me before. But how many times since, have I not escaped, terrified, out of words which pounce on you and hold you captive.

That idea of being 'pounced on' by words is useful to keep in mind while reading through the twenty short texts that make up this book, Ici, published in 1995 when the author was 95.
Each text focuses on a word or a phrase spoken by some nameless person in the narrator's circle, often a very banal or even vague word or phrase, such as Toujours (always) or Il y en a tant… (There are so many (of them)...).

Then the narrator develops a kind of poem in prose around the word that has been spoken, making it exist physically in space, ici (here) on the page, and also making it rise up in three dimensions, so that the word 'many', for example, becomes a horde of beings pressing in from all sides, and 'always' becomes a repeating sound in a frightening silence, toujours, toujours...

The phrase, ils vous pompent l'air (some people absorb all the oxygen in the room), which another nameless person drops casually in conversation, smothers the narrator as soon as she becomes aware of it, les antennes, les tentacules, les ventouses des mots se tendent, cherchent, palpent, essaient d'agripper in a way that recalls the short texts in Sarraute's first book, Tropismes, a book about the effect of people's words and actions on other people's inner sensibilities, described in similar octopus-like terms, terms that suggest overpowering, absorbing, sucking the life out of someone until atrophy results.

I could say, and yes, it's a rather banal statement, that Natalie Sarraute 'gives life to words', since they take on physical being ici/here, being which either invades or pulls back, is sometimes indignant, sometimes timid, but definitely occupies space, the space in Ici, which is also the space where thought happens, a space like a circular corridor around a conversation. Sarraute uses the word déambulatoire a few times, which is the corridor that circles the back of the altar in a Christian church, and which has side altars opening off it which always seemed to me like knots on a rope, little outcrops where a person can pause to meditate.

The image of knots on a climbing rope is used elsewhere when the narrator mediates on the word, pourquoi (why), noticing the tendency that 'why' has to multiply itself and become like literal knots on a rope that allow us to climb from 'here' to 'there', where 'there' is sometimes the level of meaning but sometimes just another abstract space where we may flounder. (To digress for a moment, the narrator lets us of the hook, as it were, on a few occasions with meditations on phrases such as hors de propos (off-topic) or coq-a-l'âne (a change of subject), meditations which allow us to stop struggling with meaning and just have a little fun).

I wondered how these texts would sound in a language other than French, partly because of the poetic quality of Sarraute's writing, the cadence of her sentences which might not translate easily, but partly because of a particular feature of the French language that actually makes reading this book in French more difficult: the fact that 'he' and 'it' are rendered by the same pronoun, 'il', except where 'it' refers back to a previously mentioned noun of feminine gender in which case 'elle' (she) is used. Sarraute seems to favour the neuter 'il' and uses it a lot, and since there are no people's names in this text and few characters anyway, 'il' is mostly 'it', reinforcing the fact that the words here are characters, and they have no gender.

Half way through reading these texts, some of which I found difficult, I did what I almost never do when reading: I looked for information about the author and her intentions. I found several interviews with her, all of them when Sarraute was very old, though none after this book was published in 1995. It was a pleasure to see her intelligent eyes and hear her thought-full voice. One of the things I noted was her theory that a writer while writing, doesn't have a gender, which is an idea I've always subscribed to (and which I feel applies to readers too). And that idea echoes not only the preference for 'it', but also something else I'd noticed in one of the texts: the narrator is meditating on the adjective 'folle' which is the feminine form of 'fou' (crazy), and says that 'folle' has extra connotation that isn't found in 'fou'. So the narrator chooses to use 'fou' to refer to both men and women though the practice is ungrammatical. That helped me better understand Sarraute's use of 'it' so frequently here in Ici

Ici, as a physical book, is a lovely almost square shape, with luxuriously creamy pages, an attractive and clear font, plentiful empty spaces for us to meditate on and maybe scribble our own thoughts about the words we've read, no forewords or afterwords or image on the front cover to interfere with our perception, nor indeed any blurb on the back.
It's a book where nothing comes between the words on the page and the reader who is reading them.

[Bogdan]

Il y a, dans ce mince bouquin, des mots cherchés, des mots trouvés, des mots qui cherchent à leur tour quelque chose à quoi s'attacher en s’attachant à eux-mêmes.

Qu'est-ce que c'est tout à coup, ces mots sortis automatiquement, venus d'eux-mêmes, de ces mots qui se tiennent toujours prêts et qui, dès qu'une chose les attire du dehors, passent tout naturellement sans avoir à subir de contrôle…

Ce furent pour moi aussi des mots entendus, dans le sens direct du terme, des mots perçus avec les oreilles, parce qu'au début, j'ai écouté le livre, raconté par l'auteure elle-même d'une voix très charmante à ses 95 ans. J'ai ensuite pris le livre en fin objet rectangulaire et j'ai parcouru avec les yeux ses pages blanc crème – des pages comme une plage –, les mots comme l’écume.

vous avez pris ces mots humbles, effacés, tout minces et transparents, pour ceux qui font exister, s'épanouir en vous une fiction, un produit de l'imagination…

La plage des pages est recouverte et découverte par des vagues, parfois par des



Mais la mer des mots a aussi ses abîmes:









et un Vortex, comme celui du film de Gaspar Noé:



Pourtant, des mots tournent, au moins un, dans le



et les mots restent ou ne sont que des restes ou ils sont

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is about words, what they mean, what intent lies behind them. Over twenty or so fragments various random phrases are explored played with in games of what seem like random association. Slogging through the book with no characters, no plot is an excruciatingly boring slog. The forced march is made all the worse for those very brief one or two pages where all of the sudden in a moment of zen your mind meshes into the book and it all makes sense. Holding on to those moments is as impossible as trying to completely clear your mind.

Authors should challenge us, they owe us no duty of care. Especially those who write experimental fiction. I can admire what the author set out to do but I must admit that the only profound emotion I felt was one of deep relief that this water torture of a book was finally over.

[Zei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sensationnel ! Pour la première fois de ma vie je lis un livre aussi plein de sens et de bon sens qui plus est!
Il décrit exactement les émotions vis-à-vis des mots, de la mémoire, de l'échange intellectuel et de notre perception de l'autre à travers le lexique qu'il emploi et de la modification de ses traits , de son intonation et du débit de ses paroles.
Au début une sensation de suffocation s'est emparée de moi, puis tour à tour l'hébétitude, l'indignation et le mépris...
Un vrai coup de coeur !

[Josée · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sur les mots, le langage, la parole qui ouvre à l'Être. Auteure fétiche pour les représentations de la conscience.

[Leonard Klossner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrative perpetually lingers on the cusp of a word, an expression, a quality; something emanant yet inexpressible or irretrievable, something so nearly lost to memory until...until...yes, the prose slowly, gradually, charms the essence from the abstract - a figure in the midst of formation, emerging from the marble - and, at last...it is on the tip of the tongue, hesitating before the threshold of - of what was it? - ah...experience, or perhaps memory; all things which, if left unexpressed, eventually resigns to the obsolescence of memory, recedes once more into the abstract until...until....

Sarraute's Here seems a meditation on the delicate interstices of language and thought, language and memory, language and consciousness. How does one make sense of experience when language proves its impotence, when all it offers is a cracked and blemished mirror through which to reflect on the past? Hesitations abound; the infrastructure of thought meanders and inevitably collapses before language can reach a resolution..

There is a poetry to Sarraute's prose that I loved and which hooked me immediately; a poetry born of vulnerability, delicacy, and the slow and languid stream of language. You know when you start nodding off during reading and lapse into these momentary spells that are like a dipping of the toes into the surreality of dreams? Naturally, it's time to shift positions or move around a bit to shake off the haze of an approaching sleep and return to reading when you're more mentally present, right? but, funny enough, that teetering state of consciousness complemented the prose, and I allowed myself to enjoy these disparate but separate aesthetic experiences - wading through the tranquil waters of Sarraute's prose in some moments, and floating through the somnolent stream of dreams in others.

[Flow Pouet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Du génie !

[Carole Brooks Platt · Rating 3 out of 5]

As an American French literature scholar, I was intrigued to see a new book by Nathalie Sarraute after so many years. Yet, it's hard to categorize other than as a parade of words, thoughts, streams of consciousness with no real reference to the people who may be speaking them. My French vocabulary grew by bounds as I looked up every word that baffled me. But I didn't feel like I ever grasped the sense of the book as a whole. Le nouveau roman: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

I thought that the book was new, but "Ici est un roman français de Nathalie Sarraute, publié en 1995.
À plus de 90 ans, Nathalie Sarraute publie son dixième roman. Dès sa publication à l'automne 1995, Ici remporte l'adhésion du public." This says that at 90 years old Sarraute published this, her tenth novel, and it was well received by the public. Furthermore, she couldn't call it "Les Mots", "The Words," because Jean-Paul Sartre had already used that title in 1963. She referes to Arcimboldo at the end of the book, and some editions have the image of this fruit-faced man, which I suppose refers to the hodgepodge of words that make up the piecemeal, yet totality, of our communications.

[Carole Brooks Platt · Rating 3 out of 5]

As an American French literature scholar, I was intrigued to see a new book by Nathalie Sarraute after so many years. Yet, it's hard to categorize other than as a parade of words, thoughts, streams of consciousness, with no real reference to the people speaking them. My French vocabulary grew by bounds as I looked up every word that baffled me. But I didn't feel like I ever grasped the sense of the book as a whole. Le nouveau roman: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Primarily about spaces as relates to words. I'll elaborate. It is about the space left by a forgotten word, which you grasp to fill; it is the space around the words spoken, the sinister or threatening insinuation of innocuous language (to be fair, I never truly bought her argument here); it is the space of the words unspoken, the ellipsis gaps of conversations; and it is the space, the silence, around words not to be spoken, those that are suppressed (primarily: death).

That sounds a bit more interesting than the book is in actuality - it's very Nouveau Roman, but feels more elusive than many of the other works I've read of the same type, and doesn't seem to contain the promise of depth that would really be needed to unpack all the unspoken spaces Sarraute has packed into the pages.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

the novel flows with such a smooth writing style, that not a word seems unnatural, abrupt or out of place. stream of conscious sentences drift across the pages. and i often lost myself in both her thought patterns and my own, such that several pages might pass before i felt how lost i was in the journey from the start to the end of a chapter and how little it mattered. a very unusual read, fitting for one desiring abstract flow and...

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could not get into this. It was way too disconnected.