| Title | : | The Planetarium |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 156478410X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781564784100 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 246 |
| Publication | : | First published May 25, 1959 |
The Planetarium Reviews
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Things… Things… Things… The aunt contemplates the things in her apartment…
…her decorator was right, everything depends on the surroundings, so many things enter into play… this beautiful piece of oak, this wall, this curtain, this furniture, these little odd pieces, what has all this got to do with a hairdresser’s parlor… one should rather think of the romanesque doors in stately old mansions, or in châteaux… No, she has no need to worry, the whole thing is in perfect taste, quiet, distinguished…
The aunt, her nephew, the nephew’s wife, her parents, his parents, his acquaintances… They interact with things… They interact with each other… They think about each other… Their thoughts aren’t flattering… And the nephew’s mother-in-law recalls her daughter wedding…And everything had gone perfectly, it had all taken place as if by a miracle, enough to make all the mothers, all their friends, turn pale with envy… the real Prince Charming, appearing at a given point… She herself had been beguiled, she herself, she’s well aware of it, had encouraged them. There were a few drawbacks, of course… but he was charming, he was handsome, he was intelligent, very gifted… whom else should she look for? and where to find him? True, she had noticed from the beginning a few little knots in the beautiful tapestry they had embroidered: a few defects of workmanship, undoubtedly, in the so prettily woven woof…
They acquire some attributes of their things… They take after their things… Some animated articles of furniture, probably… Like planets they move in their predestinate orbits… But they’re not real planets… They’re just images of planets in the planetarium…
The nephew craves his aunt’s bigger apartment but she has no wish to part with it…“Their flat seemed so small to me… and for me here, this is much too big. But, as a matter of fact, I don’t see very well how... where should I go with all of these things?… all this furniture, these memories?… I couldn’t be separated from them, they mean a lot to me… And then, I’m accustomed to this house, this neighborhood…”
Worshipping things turns the owner into their slave. -
This Dalkey Archive reprint is a brutal evisceration of bourgeois materialism, brilliantly written. The novel was originally published in 1959. It's essential reading, especially for anyone interested in the great works of twentieth-century France.
Parisians Alain and Gisele are sick of living in their tiny, cramped flat. They can't have anyone in. It's just too tiresome! Alain, a writer, can't work when Gisele is at home. So without the hindrance of anything resembling conscience, they attempt by means of suasion to remove Alain's aunt, Berthe, from her own fabulous apartment. Why does a dotty old woman need a fantastic apartment like that anyway? She can't possibly appreciate it as much as they would.
It's all about materialism, overweening materialism that triggers hubris. The characters' lives are comprised entirely of things with no self questioning or introspection. Their contempt for each other in their relentless quest for objects is appalling. The novel strikes one almost as a exposé, revealing an all too contemptible world.
I was stunned by the novel's brilliance. Perhaps because of the publication date it unspooled in my mind like a François Truffaut film--in black-and-white, complete with frame-jutter and emulsion scratches. Sarraute's contempt for her characters is profound, but this is subtext. I think it's a wonderful book for Sarraute's penetrating use of third-person free-indirect speech and the psychological depths this device allows her to plumb. -
هرچند از کودکی ساروت رمان بهتری‌ست اما برعکس کودکی که عیش مدام بود و جمله جمله‌اش را می‌شد زیست و مزه کرد افلاک نما احتمالا از افراطی‌ترین داستان‌های منسوب به رمان نو فرانسه است و خواندنش واقعا سخت. بنظرم حتی برای آشنایان با رمان نو هم این کتاب فضا و جهان متفاوتی را رقم می‌زند. افلاک نما دور موضوعات می‌چرخد و سعی می‌کند با بهره‌گیری افراطی از عقاید رمان نو داستانش را پیش ببرد. البته از نویسنده‌ای که اولین بار لغت ضدرمان توسط یک متفکر(سارتر) درباره‌ی داستانش بکار رفته انتظار دیگری نمی‌توان داشت. کتابی با چند شخصیت و یک داستان یک خطی(جابجایی میان دو خانه) که توانسته با استفاده درست از تکنیک به روان‌کاوی شخصیت‌ها بپردازد. ساروت بارها راوی‌اش را میان شخصیت‌ها جابه‌جا می‌کند و در تغییر راوی متوجه پوچی و عدم استقلال و هویت آن‌ها می‌شویم. کتاب پر است از جملات درخشان و عمیق که به مخاطب برای درک سرگشتگی روح انسان مدرن کمک می‌کند. کتاب سختی بود که خوشحالم از پسش برآمدم اما برای جهان من نبود. جهان من نه جهان ادبیات. در ادبیات هیچ منع و قراردادی منطقی نیست
ترجمه‌ی نونهالی در این‌جا هم مانند کودکی شاهکار است.
برای شناخت بیشتر رمان نو حتما سراغ آری و نه به رمان تو با ترجمه‌ی درخشان بدیعی بروید -
The terrible devastation of what we imagine other might be thinking of us . . . the yawning gaps left by obsessive introspection in the midst of our conversations . . . given all the perils of our own minds, it's rather astonishing that we're able to interact with others . . . to live in the world with other people . . . at all, really.
A bit of Woolf's multi-viewpoint voice, untethered and drifting, a bit of the new novel that Sarraute helped found, a bit of interwar-Kavan's cynicism at mercurially fluctuating emotional states -- rarely and fleetingly in accord, if ever.
On the one hand a skillful and unique micro-dissection of human interaction. Not so different, really, from the common-utterances-under-the-microscope story-essays of
The Use Of Speech. On the other, though those were essays, sort of, and this a novel, it is a novel concerned with mostly inconsequential things. The entire plot: a young writer distracts himself from writing by hoping to acquire his aunt's large apartment. I see how the utter mundanity serves Sarraulte's purposes, ordinary interactions with the guts dragged out and strewn bloodily across the page. But I still could hope for a little more narative tension, or a protagonist with slightly less petty concerns: I couldn't care less about the outcome, all pleasure here is not in what happens but how it is conveyed. -
This novel is remarkable (and, for me, 5-star worthy) for the sheer originality and effectiveness of its narrative technique. Serraute here expands on the impressionistic (for lack of a better word) method of her earlier Tropisms (an old favorite of mine)--brief phrases echoing the interior lives of ordinary people in quite ordinary situations recounted as if nothing before or after these tiny moments, these brief evocations of personality, has ever or will ever matter as much. It's a bit like seeing people through a microscope, as a scientist would examine an organism and its foibles, shifting interior world, its fears, triumphs, and particularly the human organism's radical mutability in terms of impressions and feelings when interacting with its fellows.
Although radically original and arresting, The Planetarium did remind me of a couple of other novels. First Virginia Wolf's The Waves came to mind, with its interior monologues and terrifically accurate reportage of dialogue as a series of broken and yet connected phrases and fragments. Proust's In Search of Lost Time also popped into my head several times while I read The Planetarium--yes, partially because of the Parisian setting and the fact that I spent almost all of last year reading Proust's series--but mainly because of the minuteness of the examination of human beings and their social interactions. Although Sarraute has a more fragmentary and impressionistic way of constructing these fleeting observations of the clouds of emotion passing through the sky within each of us, she, like Proust, is a mistress of laying bare the social animal in all of its emotional nudity. Arresting and fascinating without ever leaving a rather banal world that's all too familiar. -
It is astonishing, how from a text about an elderly lady grieved by an inappropriate door-knob, with more suspension points than letters, after some 30 pages a novel of such structural beauty and precision emerges, authentic and realistic down to every word, a sad workshop in thought-hearing, well worth rereading most of it twice, thrice, spasmodically, paragraph-wise, sentence-wise, to understand whose head we have been placed in in this particular passage.
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Le roman est très impressionnant sur le plan technique. Mais passé l'étonnement du début et le plaisir de comprendre comment la narration fonctionne, cette histoire de famille et d'ameublement est un poil ennuyeuse. Je soupçonne(ahaha) l'écriture de Sarraute d'être plus adaptée à la nouvelle qu'au roman.
Sur la définition de soi que l'on cherche dans l'acquisition d'objets, je trouve "Les choses" de Perec plus fort. -
I got about 50 pages into this swirling mass of snits regarding the narrator's aunt and her issues with the interior decoration of her apartment. It's been a long time since I've done this, but I cannot read this mass of nothingness without intense ennui. So this one gets hurled at the wall.
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i have to admit i was disappointed not to like this book as much as i enjoyed portrait of man unknown, but i could tell i would not, right away, as i became deeply involved in the first work, and finished in a day, but i stopped after the first battle over the easy chairs and had difficulty picking up again when i came back to it later.
i guess when it comes down to it, it's the characters sarraute chooses to focus in this book that annoy me. i'm one of these people who have to be able to empathize with characters on some level, and that's why i can only give this book a three. there are unusually startlingly beautiful and clear passages, and similes that i like but the petty bourgeois pursuits of the planetarium didn't seem to be as tempered with the desperate humanity in portrait of a man unknown. those characters were crazy, but i cared about them. these, especially alain, and his aunt, i want to take by the nose, and twist, and twist. -
"Le Planétarium" de Nathalie Sarraute est un des derniers chef-d'œuvre du genre du "Nouveau Roman" un mouvement incontournable de la littérature française qui est maintenant, Dieu Merci, derrière nous. Dans ce roman Sarraute réalise le tour de force d'unir le féminisme britannique avec le nouveau roman. "Le Planétarium" rassemble énormément aux "Vagues" de Virginia Woolf dans le sens qu'elle est constitué des monologues incohérents des personnages qui manquent de lucidité. Chez Woolf le désespoir prime. Chez Sarraute c'est le questionnement qui domine.
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3e lecture : J'arrive encore à être surprise de la richesse de ce roman. Rien n'est laissé au hasard et nombreuses sont les incises métalittéraires voilées que je trouve presque malicieuses. Un été de plus passé avec Le Planétarium partout sur moi...
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Young love meets materialism.
A newly married couple is obsessed with acquiring material things, especially antique furniture. They live in a tiny apartment. It’s unclear how the young people support themselves financially since no work is ever mentioned, although the young man, who aspires to become a writer did publish something. He’s supposed to be working on his thesis to become a professor but seems ambitionless. They blame the small apartment in which “he can’t work.”
A solution: talk his widowed, wealthy aunt into moving out of her large, lavishly furnished apartment and giving it to them. The aunt would move elsewhere into an appropriately-sized apartment. This elaborate endeavor becomes the main focus of the story. In his various machinations, the young man talks his wife into appealing to his own father to talk to the aunt (his father’s sister). Can she charm him into pleading for them with his sister?
Furnishings and furniture symbolize this obsession with materialism that affects all the characters. The young couple is fascinated by a bergère they can’t really afford (an antique, long-seated armchair). The aunt has just renovated her apartment with the installation of an oval door and velvet curtains. The young man’s father prizes his new glass-fronted bookcase that the young people make fun of it. The young man’s mother-in-law insists she wants to buy the couple ‘functional chairs’ and they see this as a ‘control’ and ‘power’ thing to influence their marriage by ‘setting them straight.’
Several people in the story seem to have manic depressive traits. The old aunt is at first glowing with satisfaction at the renovation work she’s having done and praising the workmen; the next day she thinks it looks cheap and the workmen were slobs. The young man, who can’t bring himself to actually do any work or research, also swings between moods of depression and elation.
Another extended thread becomes the young man’s obsessive adulation of an older woman writer; a Grand Dame of French literature, who runs what seems like a literary salon. But instead of gathering peers, she attracts young people of both sexes who sit at her feet, at her beck and call, while she pontificates.
Almost all …of the story…is told in streams of consciousness…in page-length paragraphs…with an ellipsis as the most common form of punctuation.… The narration in a paragraph can switch from first person to second person to third person. The dialogue is contained within these paragraphs and it requires careful reading to separate from the stream what someone wants to say, or could have said, or should have said, versus what they did say!
As an example of writing style, here’s a passage of dialog spoken by the young married woman: “I thought that we might make a plaster ledge, very wide, you remember, like in that house… - Which house, darling? - You know... Not at San Giminiano...no, I think it was near Lucques…We saw a tower in a village, on the hill...Near Lucques, yes, that was it: San Miniato, Frederic II’s tower...Well then, just after San Miniato…you remember that old farm where we went in...There was a big, square courtyard with old paving stones and a tree, you don’t remember?... Yes, you do...near a small lake…it reminded us of the enchanted tree we saw in Scotland...I made you come back to look out the window of a low-ceilinged room…Well, the window had a ledge, I showed it to you...and we could get an old bench...you can certainly find one…with short legs, sort of dumpy, an old bench all shiny with age, the sun would strike it...it should have a perfectly straight back...or rather no, no back...Why, you’re crazy, Alain, people can see us...what must they think... - They must think that I adore you...that we are like two lovers... – That’s true, that will set their minds at rest. A little while ago, I said to myself…didn’t you?...that we gave the impression of two burglars, looking over the premises. Getting ready to do the job...We were hiding there like two criminals...”
This is a book that you will love or hate. People say that occasionally but I think the GR ratings show that to be the case. It’s rated 3.6 on GR and has almost as many 1s and 2s as 5s. And if you look at reviews you will see “brilliance” and “crap.” I’ll give it a 3.5 and round up to my usual 4. I'm interested in reading more of her work. Sarraute wrote about ten novels; all appear to have been translated into English. Planetarium was published in 1959.
The author (1900-1999) was a Russian Jew who left Russia for Paris in 1909. I’m fascinated by the coincidence that my last review, The Dogs and the Wolves, was a book by a female Ukrainian Jew, Irene Nemirovsky. Irene, born in 1903, left for Paris 1917. Both authors wrote in French and both were persecuted as Jews in WW II. Nathalie divorced her non-Jewish husband to protect him and then managed to hide for the duration of the war. Irene died in Auschwitz.
Two photos of Paris apartments from parisdesignagenda.com and veranda.com
A bergère from pamono.com
The author from
larousse.fr/encyclopedie -
Je vais commencer ce compte rendu en disant que ça fait longtemps depuis que j’étais à l’université et étudiant la langue française.
Avant de commencer ce livre, je devrais rendu compte que c’était un livre dans le style “stream of consciousness” et c’est peut être trop compliqué pour mon niveau de français. Quand même, je dirais que j’ai compris peut être 60-70% du livre. Je trouvais que le livre était vraiment un peu trop lent pour moi… il y a beaucoup de dialogue et pas beaucoup d’action. C’était une étude intéressant des liens familiales et de l’identité, mais le manque de ponctuation et les longues blocs de texte était un peu trop pour moi. -
if i could give half stars, i'd go with three and a half. her style, even in translation, is really interesting, hard to get used to, a little difficult to navigate. to me this novel seemed, for a long time, to be simply another take on the reality/appearance binary. but then i decided that wasn't it at all, and it's much more about how we influence others unwittingly and how much people are affected by not just what we say and do, but also by what people think we might say and do, or what we might be thinking. and sort of how fucking needy we all are. the plot, what it's about is very domestic, which isn't usually my thing. but it was handled in a very interesting way, and i look forward to reading some of her other novels.
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ناتالی ساروت خالق آثاری چون: چهره يك بيگانه، مارترو، عصر بدگماني، افلاک نما، بين زندگي و مرگ و نمايشنامه هاي: سكوت، دروغ، ايسما، به خاطر يك بله يا يك نه ناتالی ساروت در 18 ژوئیه 1900 در روسیه به دنیا آمد و دو سال بعد، پس از جدایی پدر و مادرش مقیم فرانسه شد. در سال 1925 با ریموند ساروت در دانشکده آشنا شد که به ادعای خودش بهترین و اولین خواننده‌ی همیشگی آثارش بوده، کسی که مفهوم تراوشات قلمی او را چنان که بایست درمی‌یافت. ادامه:
ketabdarkhaneh.blogfa.com/post-31.aspx -
Sarraute creates inner worlds as complex and convincing as any you'll ever read...but the book (except in a few, rare instances) isn't hard to follow. Your mind will race as you try to discern which character's take is the most/least reliable, and be left to wonder how human social protocols function as well as they do. A great book--she's plumbed the depths of her characters' minds better than I ever have my own.
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J'ai lu les 120 premières pages soit la moitié du livre et je n'ai absolument rien compris du propos du livre. Ça m'est passé complètement au-dessus. C'est bourgeois, il est question d'hommes charismatiques a souhait et de décoration intérieure. Autant dire que je ne vais pas me forcer à aller plus loin dans un tel supplice.
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به نظر من بعد از خواندن هر صفحه از کتاب باید چشم هارو بست و هرچی که از آن صفحه توی ذهنت باقی مانده رو احساس کرد . تنها راهی که بعد از دوبار خواندن این کتاب باعث شد کمی این نوشته و نویسنده رو درک کنم همین بود.
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Very annoying book.
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I needed to push through. There are moments of brilliance though.
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En toute honnêteté : je n'ai rien compris à ce livre. Acheté un peu au pif dans une brocante parce que je voulais un classique écrit par une auteure qui me sorte de mes thèmes de prédilection... je me retrouve nez-à-nez avec une oeuvre emblématique du Nouveau Roman... je n'étais pas prête. C'était un peu idiot, ce choix d'un livre de 1959. Peut-être aurais-je pu... Si j'avais su... Mais non... Je suis allée jusqu'au bout, obstination, acharnement, consternation, épuisement, dans l'espoir de voir où l'auteure voulait en venir... mais je crois que ce mépris... des codes du roman, de l'intrigue, de la ponctuation même... Tous ces trois petits points... et ces personnages, ce point de vue incertain, ces monologues de dix pages, petit rire jaune, ces situations ubuesques, ce style si élégant mais pourtant ardu, ce titre incompréhensible... ne seraient-ils qu'un reflet creux de la vacuité de la condition humaine ? Je... Je vais aller prendre un doliprane.
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Found a second hand copy in my local bookshop and so glad I took a chance . If you like Proust , Joyce and Woolf you'll like this too. Stream of consciousness masterpiece. Post war Paris . Ruthless dissection of intellectual society , avarice , materialism and status
, we are under the fragile skin of several characters as they navigate their relationships. Nothing really happens but everything happens. It's like Austen without a plot to reveal character but we truly know these people .
It's timeless but I can't help thinking that the experience of antisemitism up close and personal in occupied France was running like a deep base note through every page . Nothing is what it seems . There is no trust . We are all fallible. -
Though this is still a pretty solid book, I find I often like Nathalie Sarraute's work less than other nouveau roman writer's such as Marguerite Duras or Alain Robbe-Grillet.
The edition I read was actually the first English edition from 1960 (published by George Braziller, Inc.) but the dust cover was lost long ago so I have no idea what the cover of this one looked like. -
Jag orkar inte skriva något utförligt just nu men jag förstår vad texten gör, jag tyckte bara att den var rätt irriterande.
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Joyless, cynical, deeply affected. Bad and uninteresting caricatures of people I try in my life to be as far away from as possible.
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I was prepared for boring, so it met all my expectations.
I stopped reading around page 95 and browsed the last chapter.
It tells the story of a young couple who want the old aunt's apartment and manages to get it at the end.
Still, I can understand what Sarraute's purpose was : to give the reader a complete picture of what the characters tell, think, do and feel while they are interacting with others. It's an experimental and interesting attempt, and I found it lively and enjoyable at the beginning, but very tedious after a while, because what they tell, think and feel is pointless. The fact she has chosen to portray vain middle-class wannabe didn't help. The books seems an ode to emptiness. I welcome any kind of literary experiment, but it has to be intellectually stimulating, and this book is not. The form is challenging, but it lacks substance.
Why it was titled "planetarium" will remain a mystery to me ; I think "Nebula" would have been more appropriate. -
Makes intense use of "free indirect speech" in a sort of aggressive blind-contouring of characters, and ricochets POV often, forcing the reader to orient and reorient through a kind of disjointing echolocation. You eventually come to find you've been listening to a bunch of blathering, spiritually void, self-obsessed bourgeois assholes fighting over nice furniture. I almost loved it. It's good that it's short.
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This novel didn’t work for me, partly, I think, because of the translation. Another overly (for me) hermetic, internal novel, so much of the time and place.
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نه خیلی قوی . بیشتر توی مواجهه با اشیا و افراد دیالوگ برقرار می شد و از دنیای واقعی یکم دور بود
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i will read it again
