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Article: Reading Nathalie Sarraute. Dialogue and Distance.(Review)
- Article from:
- Journal of European Studies
- Article date:
- September 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Sage Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Reading Nathalie Sarraute. Dialogue and Distance. By Emer O'Beirne. (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. 298. [pound]40.00.
Prominent among the dialogues which Nathalie Sarraute enacts for us in her fiction is that of the text and its reader. As a thematic concern, it surfaces more explicitly in some works than in others but is arguably present throughout, from the fruitless attempts by the narrator of Portrait to convert a reluctant audience, to the invitation contained in the title of her last published work: Ouvrez must surely be construed, in the first instance, as an imperative addressed to the reader. It is ...