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Article: Reading Nathalie Sarraute: Dialogue and Distance.(Review)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Modern Language Review
- Article date:
- July 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Modern Humanities Research Association. 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: Clarendon Press. 1999. vi + 259 pp.
On the cover of Emer O'Beirne's book is a sepia photograph of Nathalie Sarraute gazing quizzically at the reader from her garden. The octogenarian author (the photo was taken in 1980) looks decidedly ill-at-ease perched on an iron bench and surrounded by empty chairs. This image of the writer as a solitary figure, exiled in familiar surroundings, works well, however, as a visual restatement of O'Beirne's subtitle, 'Dialogue and Distance': both capture nicely the tension between isolisme and fraternite, between self and other, that drives all Sarraute's ...