| Title | : | Enfance |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | French |
| Format Type | : | Mass Market Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 277 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1983 |
| Awards | : | Scott Moncrieff Prize Barbara Wright (1985), Premio Grinzane Cavour Narrativa Straniera (1984) |
Un livre où l'on peut voir se dessiner déjà le futur grand écrivain qui donnera plus tard une œuvre dont la sonorité est unique à notre époque.
Enfance Reviews
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Childhood is built as an inner dialogue of an ego and alter ego or probably the inner self just interrogates the author’s memory at some sort of a Freudian psychoanalytical session.
And the fragmentary, spontaneous, sporadic recollections are slowly adding up into the picture of child’s world – the bleak world of anxiety and unhappiness. Being torn up by the troubles and tumultuous relationships inside her family, Nathalie turns into her parents’ hostage and she finds herself submerged into rejection, loneliness, and abandonment.
So in her school essay “My First Sorrow” she subconsciously transfers her inner misery on her imaginary puppy describing it being killed by a train:Now the moment has come to concentrate all my forces for the great leap forward… the arrival of the train, its din, its scalding steam, its enormous, blazing eyes. And then, when the train has passed, between the rails the tuft of white hairs, the pool of blood…
But I won’t let myself touch that yet. I want to let the words take their time, choose their moment, I know I can rely on them… the last words always make their appearance as if propelled by all the preceding ones...
That was Nathalie’s first creative experience and I believe ever since she’s been looking for her shelter in words, books and literature.
“The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.” – Nathalie Sarraute.
But anyway, Childhood is the Nathalie Sarraute’s first-rate catharsis. -
There's a funny episode in Nathalie Sarraute's memoir of her childhood in which her teacher asks the class to write about a sad thing that happened in their lives. Ten year-old Nathalie makes up a story about a pet dog, drowned in a lake. Then she thinks, no, that's not sad enough, so she alters the ending and makes him get run over by a train, his tattered fur and a pool of blood and guts all that remains of the beloved dog.
How is that funny?
Because ever since she can remember, Natacha/Nathalie has lived between countries and between languages, ferried back and forth between her mother and stepfather in Paris and later in Saint Petersburg, and her father and (unwilling) stepmother in Moscow and later in Paris. Furthermore, at ten years old, it seems as if her mother will never come to Paris to fetch her ever again. She didn't need to make up a sad story!
But a ten year old could not write about any of that, so of course she would make up a story instead!
Yes, but her little stepsister's nursemaid had just thrown away Nathalie's beloved teddy bear because his stitching was coming undone and his stuffing was spilling out. Nathalie had a readymade sad story to tell if she chose—and it would have neatly summarised her entire sorry situation.
Maybe that is the story she wrote for her teacher, only she fictionalised it.
Hmm. Yes, maybe you're right. The future writer already shaping the events of her life into fiction. Indeed, as I read this memoir, I found elements in it that I could trace to the analysis of people's interactions which Sarraute makes the focus of the two novels I've read by her,
Tropismes and
Martereau.
Don't forget that
Enfance was written much later than those novels, and it may rather be a case of the method of analysing people's interactions she developed in those books influencing the way she recreated her childhood memories.
Of course, yes, she had to be looking back through the filter of the writing that had filled the intervening years. But still, I feel the seeds lay in those childhood experiences.
But what about that episode near the beginning where, very young, she rips open the silk cover of an armchair with a scissors, and is described as noticing grey, formless matter bursting through the opening in the covering. That episode has been edited by the adult mind that produced Tropismes, surely.
You could say instead that it was exactly that kind of urge to examine the inside of things that resulted eventually in the writing of Tropismes. The child who was motivated to make that experiment and then observe the result so carefully became the adult who would carefully record the soft interiorness of the unnamed characters in Tropismes.
Perhaps. But to take another example, surely only an adult could interpret the relationship between the mother and her second husband in terms of the child being a foreign body that had to be expelled from the tight unit they formed together. That's a way of thinking that comes directly from Tropismes.
As to that, Nathalie Sarraute admits, in the dialogue with herself that structures this memoir, that such a way of describing the dynamic is indeed adult thinking, but she insists at the same time that her eight-year old self understood, even if only hazily, that she was being excluded at a physical level.
I'm glad you've mentioned that the memoir is written in the form of a conversation between Nathalie Sarraute and herself, between Nathalie and Natacha as it were, a conversation in which one constantly questions what the other tries to extract from the past.
Yes, I admired that aspect a lot. It makes reading about Sarraute's childhood memories extra interesting and gives the reader a role in the memoir since Natacha challenges the way Nathalie phrases everything just as the reader might, asking if that is how a child would have experienced such a thing or is it a case of projecting adult experience onto a remembered incident. It's all very skillfully done, and what's more, the writing is beautifully clear, on a par with Nabokov's
Speak, Memory, which is my standard for memoir writing. The books are alike in other ways too, especially for the way that everything related to Russia takes on a mythical gloss.
Well, since their Russian childhoods both date from before the revolution—Nabokov was born in 1899, Sarraute in 1900—Saint Petersburg as they remembered it no longer existed. A case of a search for a lost time.
Yes, and it was impossible not to think of Proust's search for lost time too, not only for the obvious parallel of an adult seeking to recall their childhood but also for the many episodes set around the difficulties of falling asleep and the longing for the mother. I also found parallels with Henry James's
What Maisie Knew, Maisie constantly shunted between her parents and their partners, having to rely on various nursemaids for variable comfort yet absorbing everything she witnessed, and processing it all for better or worse. The narrator in Fleur Jaeggy's
S. S. Proleterka also shares some traits and experiences with the young Nathalie. She too had an absent mother, and only saw her father for short holidays, needing to get reacquainted with an almost-stranger every time, the consequent confusion resulting in behavior that veered wildly between obedience and rebelliousness.
Better stop making connections with other books, don't you think?
Ok. But one final thought. I was very struck by Sarraute's frequent reference to her ability even as a small child to imitate the people around her. A child who can do that must surely be an acute observer. Is it any wonder that she should have grown up to write such incisive books about how people behave towards each other and the inner feelings that lie behind their outer behaviour. -
“Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative” . . . this narrative is us, our identities” (Oliver Sacks); ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives’ (Jerry Bruner); ‘we are all virtuoso novelists. . . . We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character . . . of that autobiography is one’s self’ (Dan Dennett). Moreover, to have a good life we should be like that: A person ‘creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person’ (Marya Schechtman)
I’ve taken these examples from the article by Galen Strawson “Against the narrativity”. He claims that the prevailing view in the modern academia, and in the broader society as well (I add from myself), is like that:
“one may think that all normal non-pathological human beings are naturally narrative and also that narrativity is crucial to a good life”. The above examples support this claim and illustrate what is meant by the “narrative” in this concept. Strawson vehemently argues against this view. He believes there are two types of selfs. There are ones who really consider their past, present and future as a continuous narrative. But the others do see it that way. Their selves are more episodic and they do not need to connect their life into one coherent story. Strawson considers himself as one of the latter.
It does not mean that the past does not exist for such people. Arguably, their past is more “genuinely alive”. Strawson brings up Rilke’s remarks on poetry and memory, ‘For the sake of a single poem, you must have . . . many . . . memories. . . . And yet it is not enough to have memories. . . . For the memories themselves are not important.’ They give rise to a good poem ‘only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves.”
I brought up here Strawson and Rilke because I think Sarraute would totally agree with them. I think she might be one of these “episodic” people like Strawson. And I strongly suspect I am the one as well. I absolutely do not see my life as a single narrative in any sense, even in the chronological one, well that is apart from the unfortunate biological aspect. Therefore, to read “Childhood” was a very relatable experience for me. It brought up my very first memory of looking at a sack of apples and saying the word “an apple”. Or, the next one of looking at the snow coming down and feeling that I am flying towards it… I can continue, but my point is that what is left is just bits which i would not know as important but they just there, and I treasure them.
Sarraute flashes out the memories from her childhood like the material for a poem in Rilke’s sense. They are like a separate little shapes which do not need to form a full picture. Instead they are incorporated into something deeper that cannot be seen as a whole, but important for Sarraute’s now nevertheless. 83 years old, she probes whether she still feels the same happiness, anguish or loneliness she felt when she was 11 and younger. At the same time, now it seems simply important for her to collect those little colourful, fragile but prickly pieces together, like in a museum; to move from one to another until the eternity would shut its door on them forever.
This is the view from the Winter palace, St Petersburg. The picture I took the last time I’ve been there 15 years ago. But I have a feeling it is not very different from what young Natasha remembered after she has left the city for the last time aged 8 in 1908. Since then it was Paris for her.
With modernism, the novels in the form of the internal monologue or stream of consciousness have become a literary mainstream. “Childhood” takes this one step farther however. It is an internal dialogue: Sarraute talks to herself. The one of voices asks another questions, triggers memories and probes their authenticity. I loved it. I could remember only one another book I’ve read where it has been done successfully. It is
A School for Fools written by Sasha Sokolov in the 60s. It is narrated from the perspective of a teenager who might have a personality split but we would not know for sure. In any case, the novel is narrated by two parts of his selves who argue a lot. Nabokov has called the novel "an enchanting, tragic, and touching work." But it is already a different book and a different story.
PS
For those who wants to read the whole article by Galen Strawson:
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Paper/agains... -
درباره ی ساروت گفته اند و می دانیم که او به شیوه ای دیگرگونه از شیوه ی مرسومِ روزگارش، نوشتنْ آغاز کرده است و نقب زدن های او در جانِ آدم ها و اشیا و ارتباطِ میانِ اینها از شگردهای بنیادینِ اوست. از این دیدگاه رمانِ(به تعبیری ضدِرمان) کودکی نیز مواجهه ای ست با خود؛ با خاطره و صورت های از یاد رفته، نام ها و مکان ها و چیزها. گردآوری اینها و درباره ی رابطه ی اینها نوشتن و از این راه در پیِ یافتن منِ خود بودن. آن گونه که ناتالی ساروتِ جان نوشته است. بنابراین حوصله می خواهد و یک سببِ شخصی شاید. یک دلیل برای چنین مواجهه ای با متن و با خودِ هنگام خواندنِ آن
برای من کودکی راهِ گریزی ست به یک جهانِ گاه فراموش شده و بازگشت به چیزی که گاهی گمان می کنی خیالی بیش نبوده اس��. جا به جایی واقعیت و وهم و باز گم شدن میان مرز این دو. و راستی کودکی کی پایان می پذیرد؟ آن خطِ پایانش کجاست؟ آن نقطه ی که در آخر فصل می نشیند در چه زمانی ست؟ کودکی داستان که نه اما شاید بتوانم بگویم گفتنِ داستانِ کودکی ست. هر کدام هم داریم اش به گونه ای شخصی، خصوصی شده و دست نخورده. همه ی آن چیزها هم همراه ِ من است. آن آدم ها، مکان ها، چیزها و تمام
1397.12.22 -
In this unique memoir of her childhood, Nathalie Sarraute engages two voices as the form of a self-dialogue in reconstructing her formative years up until she was about fourteen. After her early life in Russia, she splits time with her father in Paris and Moscow and her mother in Budapest, Berlin, St. Petersburg...
One voice is immersing into her younger self, experiencing her relationship with those closest to her, most importantly with her parents (both before and after their divorce) and step-mother. By speaking mostly in the present tense, she effectively projects her childhood self. The memories flow in fragments, punctuated by the moments when her childhood thoughts and reactions are most intense. These immersive remembrances are interrupted by the other internal voice which, with questions and brief comments, probes the limits of memories and the significance of different episodes in forming her personality. One voice is almost poetic, the other self-analytical. What emerges from this wholly original memoir through self-dialogue is as truthful of an introspection into her inner self as it gets.
Written when Sarraute was 83 years old, it beautifully merges the early dawn and the quiet sunset of one’s life. -
همان صفحهی اولش کافی بود تا کتاب را تا انتها رها نکنم. یک اثر شگفتانگیز. ساروت به زیبایی تمام دنیای یک کودک ساده جستجوگر و دارای مشکلات خانوادگی را شرح میدهد. ترجمه ی نشر نیلوفر هم عالی است. -
favorite read of 2022 so far, the writing was phenomenal, the way childhood, growing up and memory were discussed was so captivating and the pace was absolutely perfect
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Un livre à part dans le genre autobiographique.
En choisissant de dialoguer avec son double, Nathalie Sarraute peut insister sur le problème des souvenirs dans l'écriture autobiographique : ai-je pensé cela à ce moment-là, enfant, ou est-ce mon regard d'adulte sur cet épisode qui me fait dire cela ?
Comme elle le dit dans le dernier paragraphe, elle "[fait] surgir des moments" qui l'ont plus profondément marquée que d'autres, souvent en raison de l'incompréhension de son regard d'enfant sur les actes et paroles des adultes. Ces scènes, mal situées chronologiquement, sans début ni fin précis, transcrivent à merveille le fonctionnement de la mémoire. En lisant, je me remémorais mes propres souvenirs d'enfance, en essayant d'avoir le même regard critique qu'elle, de voir comment les souvenirs s'agencent entre eux, comment l'un en entraîne un autre...
Une écriture superbe dont on regrette qu'elle ne remplisse pas plus de pages. Un livre que l'on peut attraper et ouvrir au hasard pour se plonger dans un des brefs chapitres et tout admirer. -
Tai, kas išlieka iš ankstesnių bandymų, mums visada atrodo vertingiau už tai, kas dar tik virpčioja miglotuos toliuos...
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کتاب کودکی ترجمۀ خوب مهشید نونهالی
نمونهای از (( رمان نو )) فرانسه
روایتی آرام، معصوم و زیبا از زندگی یک دختر بچه
نه قهرمان است و نه خواستههای بزرگی دارد. میخواهد زندگی کند و زندگی را درک کند
کنکاش در خاطرات گذشتههای دور و نزدیک
من این داستان را خیلی پسندیدم و ارتباط خوبی با آن برقرار کردم
سادگی توصیفها و لحن صادقانهاش مرا مجذوب کرد -
une lecture très émouvante. L’écriture de l’autrice est sublime…
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Enfance , c'est le genre de roman qui n'a ni début, ni fin.
C'est vrai, la narratrice choisit d'y aborder ses souvenirs d'enfance en dialogue avec son alter ego et, dans ce projet, on peut voir un début. Et puis, elle qualifie son voyage en tramway jusqu'au lycée comme la fin de l'enfance et explique en cela le choix d'arrêter son récit. Mais il n'y a pas vraiment d'histoire. Il s'agit plutôt d'une mise en scène de l'enfance, à travers des événements plus ou moins reliés. Ça commence ici et ça se termine là, mais ça pourrait être n'importe quand, par n'importe quoi. Et, en y réfléchissant bien, ça m'a plu.
Je trouve qu'il y a quelque chose de partagé dans l'enfance, même si nous avons des situations familiales différentes. Quelque chose dans les sentiments éprouvés par rapport aux adultes, dans les reproches qu'on nous fait, dans nos cauchemars, dans nos amitiés, dans notre parcours scolaire nous lie intimement. C'est sûrement pourquoi j'aimais suivre une fillette qui ne se présente pas en héroïne dans une sorte d'aventure enfantine, mais simplement une fillette comme toutes les autres à qui il n'arrive, somme toute, «pas grand-chose».
P.S. J'ai lu la scène de la confiture de fraises à mon père, qui a «sournoisement introduit» un médicament «répugnant» dans ma compote de pommes quand j'avais quatre ou cinq ans. Il a trouvé ça très drôle. Je lui en veux encore. -
I love this approach to autobiography: a dialogue between self and self. (I almost want to write my own!)
Very engaging despite its formlessness. Her prose is lovely. The translation from French feels seamless. -
What an amazing writer--I've read Sarraute's Planetarium, which is strange and wonderful--this is her memoir but written in her unique interrogatory style. It was of specific interest to me because she's exactly the same age as the character I'm writing about now--born in 1900 in Russia--her intellectual and bohemian mother and scientist/social revolutionary father both intriguing personages... seen in the very subjective point of view of a bright child--who is observing her own mental processes, while the storyteller is also questioning her own memories and the subjectivity of choice in telling the story. I love her style, all self-interruptions and ellipses... Memoir's not my favorite genre, but this is so much about style, more about consciousness and the evolution of self than a continuous narrative.
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Dans son livre Enfance (1983), Nathalie Sarraute rassemble des souvenirs de ses onze premières années. La narration s’arrête au moment où la petite fille entre en sixième. L’une des originalités de ce brillant récit réside dans le dédoublement de la narratrice. Deux « voix » dialoguent, qui représentent l’une et l’autre l'auteur, mais qui incarnent des postures différentes à l’égard du travail de mémoire. L’une de ces voix assume la conduite du récit, l’autre représente la conscience critique. Selon les moments, cette seconde voix freine l’élan de la première, la met en garde contre les risques de forcer l'interprétation ou inversement la pousse à l'approfondir. Grâce à ce système des deux voix, nous avons deux livres en un : d'une part un récit d'enfance, de l'autre un témoignage sur la méthode d’investigation du passé élaborée par l’auteur pour déjouer les pièges traditionnels de l'entreprise autobiographique.
Acheté pour l’étude du biographique thème au programme du baccalauréat francais 2002. Belle découverte littéraire. -
Nathalie haalt herinneringen zo kritisch mogelijk terug boven om ons en zichzelf volledig te werpen in belevenissen van veel te lang geleden, maar waarom juist deze herinneringen? Ze tonen korte momenten waarin de wereld zich toont in "toute sa nouveauté et dans sa stupéfiante gratuité", wat voor Sarraute de enige overblijvende betekenis van het schrijven is.
Nathalie maakt in deze autobiografie een logische maar fictieve scheiding tussen zichzelf en een stem die skeptischer zou zijn over hoe ze zich haar herinneringen voorstelt, hoewel die stem even goed Nathalie is. Nathalie is zelf een "être sans contours", ze geeft met al deze herinneringen geen antwoord op wie ze precies is.
Ze toont ons dat ze geleefd heeft en dat dat altijd iets hevigs en beladen is. -
C'est apaisant, c'est rassurant d'être là toute seule enfermée dans ma chambre... personne ne viendra me déranger, je "fais mes devoirs", j'accomplis un devoir que tout le monde respecte... Lili crie, Véra se fâche je ne sais contre quoi ni contre qui, des gens vont et viennent derrière ma porte, rien de tout cela ne me concerne... J'essuie ma plume sur un petit carré de feutre, je la trempe dans le flacon d'encre noire, je recouvre en faisant très attention... il faut qu'il n'y ait aucune bavure... les pâles fantômes de bâtonnets, de lettres, je les rends le plus visibles, le plus nets possible... je contrains ma main et elle m'obéit de mieux en mieux...
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Ik heb veel commentaar geleverd over dit boek, en toch heeft het me geraakt. Het was niet makkelijk te volgen, vaak was het heel erg vaag en onduidelijk, maar toch kon ik me in de schoenen van jonge Natasha plaatsen. Het was duidelijk geen gemakkelijke jeugd, maar wow, wat is dit boek geslaagd.
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Hoewel het vaak frustrerend was om dit boek te proberen te begrijpen, en ik toch wel enkele keren vanaf 0 opnieuw begonnen ben, heb ik er toch van genoten. De manier waarop dit boek geschreven is voelt heel uniek, en ik wou dat ik mij dingen zo duidelijk zou kunnen herinneren.
3,5/5 ⭐
ps. dankje Nathalie voor dat extra puntje op mijn examen you're a real one! -
Lu une première fois, visiblement, où je lui avais donné 2 étoiles.
Relu ce mois de septembre 2022, espérant y trouver une histoire d'amitié pour mon challenge des fantastiques classiques. Échec total.
On y lit l'amour de Nathalie pour l'école, sa crainte d'abîmer les mots, son tiraillement entre deux langues, deux cultures et des parents qui se détestent. Un doux bonbon, qui goûte l'enfance du début du siècle dernier. -
Tai, kas išlieka iš ankstesnių bandymų, mums visada atrodo vertingiau už tai, kas dar tik virpčioja miglotuos toliuos...
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Sa vie est tellement chiante jsp tu f une autobiographie moi je dis pq pas mais si c pour raconter ta journee au parc c pas la peine
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*3.5
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Incroyablement bien écrit, les mots sont beaux et justes. Un peu long au milieu mais Sarraute fait de sa recherche de soi dans le passé une expérience universelle.
J’avais peur de pas aimer mais je suis surprise. -
sarraute! i have fallen in love! this is a very precise, vivid, trembling examination both of childhood (the myriad wonders, the comfort with mystery, the savantish ways of knowing, and the constant loss of wisdom as childhood becomes adolescence becomes adulthood) and of memory itself (elusive, combatitive, a struggle against death). reading this was better than a visit to my shrink, evoking, as it did, a tumble of my own childhood memories, as well as encouraging an interrogation of my own memory -- i would recommend it as a magic text for anyone writing about their past.
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Having never heard of the Nouveau Roman before and being very nostalgic and fascinated with the idea of childhood, reading this novel has been a very nice experience overall. It’s a nice approach, given the characteristics of the movement and Sarraute’s involvement in it, to writing an autobiography.
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J'ai beaucoup aimé ce livre, notamment la façon dont l'auteure manie le langage. L'alternance entre les souvenirs relatés du point de vue de l'enfant et les commentaires faits par l'adulte et son alter ego ajoute une dimension très intéressante au texte.
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Think: a Russian emigre 'Le Petit Nicolas', only she's the daughter of maritally (even more) fractious parents, with a precocious literary talent, a faith-giving love of the written word and a tendency to argue with herself in middle age. Delightful and often pretty funny.
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l’effort d’intellectualisation des souvenirs de l’auteur émeut, le langage éclate le personnage, accuse le pacte autobiographique et manie la mémoire. elle, comme toute autre chose, n’est pour l’homme qu’une gauche tentative de l’insaisissable.
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"The disease was in me. This disease had chosen me because it found in me the nourishment it needed. It would never have been able to live in the healthy, pure, childish mind which other children possess."
