THE PLANETARIUM

by Nathalie Sarraute ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 30, 1960

In a prose of disturbing clarity that evokes a mood of bleakness and desolation Nathalie Sarraute writes of a world in which the real and the imagined are often indistinguishable, in which characters dangle helplessly in the voids created by their anxieties and apprehensions. In the world inhabited by Mme. Sarraute's distressingly sensitive people, meanings are defined in pauses, gestures assume more significance than comment, and appearances are merely a trap for the unwary. The Planetarium presents a set of characters whose small worlds collide but rarely penetrate. An old woman, out of desperation, focuses on the minutiae of her life trying to create an orderly universe in miniature. But to Alain, her nephew, who is trying to obtain her apartment she is merely a tyrant. Alain, a young bourgeois intellectual, tormented by his wife's blunderings, is himself dissolved into ineffectuality in the presence of his literary idol and her clique. On this surface of the commonplace -- devoted to the discussion of easy chairs, door handles, the stock market -- the sinister begins to make itself felt and events assume the pattern of dreams. But there is no awakening and even ""the greatest intimacy is constantly being traversed by silent flashes of cold clearsightedness, of loneliness"". Mme. Sarraute, trying as she is, has received respectful attention with her earlier novels- Portrait of a Man Unknown and Martereau.

Pub Date: March 30, 1960

ISBN: 156478410X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Braziller

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1960

Categories: FICTION