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“... When I mentioned​ to a friend that I was going to review a biography of Nathalie Sarraute, his first question was: ‘Will she last?’ I hesitated to reply. First of all, it’s not clear what it means for a writer to ‘last’. Do we mean that she wrote books that will be read for pleasure for centuries, like Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina? Sarraute was too avant-garde – too highbrow – to compete with Austen in the popularity stakes ...”

“... Nathalie Sarraute had her own, esoteric way of doing well at school. When, at her Paris lycée, her class was asked whether anyone had read War and Peace, the 13-year-old Nathalie (née Natalya Tcherniak, in Russia), did not want to say that she had. She was fearful: not of advertising how grown-up her reading had already become but of what she might have to listen to should her teacher ‘dare to touch’ the book and the ineffable Tolstoy be invested by the crass discourse of a pedagogue ...”

“... Butor and Claude Simon, from her studies of recent French literature or from her knowing Nathalie Sarraute. She realises that there is some common ground between her writing and that of the grande dame of French literature: ‘Je cherche sans doute quelque chose de l’ordre de ce que cherche ...”

“... before entering literary history as the Nouveaux Romanciers: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and the hugely entertaining and wrongly overlooked Robert Pinget. Beckett in particular, and later the very bankable Robbe-Grillet and Simon, seem never to have thought of being published by anyone else, even if it did mean ...”

“... Duras liked other women if they were actresses; she loathed Simone de Beauvoir but counted Nathalie Sarraute as one of her closest friends. She was wary of feminism as one of ‘all these rather obtuse forms of activism that don’t always lead to true female emancipation’. (She’d left the Communist Party in the late 1950s and saw Marxism as ...”

“... can be sharp, philosophically. She is attracted by the proposition: ‘Formalism is realism.’ Nathalie Sarraute had argued that so-called realists were really formalists because they imitated the forms of their predecessors. This left the obscure apodosis: ‘The formalists are the true realists.’ If this is allowed to ripen into the full ...”

“... of The Magic Christian and the famously dirty book Candy); or the French New Novelist Nathalie Sarraute, who singled out Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett as (after the demise of Woolf) the most original and distinctive voices in British writing. Southern managed to coax out of Green, who was notoriously inarticulate (and not just from the ...”

“... the Nouveau Roman. She felt much too superior to Claude Simon, Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor. Nathalie Sarraute was almost the only living French writer she approved of. These were the years of Sartre’s ascendancy. MD, however, steered clear of the arch-guru and despised Camus. At the same time she tried, unsuccessfully, to publish short stories in ...”

“... smaller ones with figures like the aged Bernard Berenson, and the aborted ones with figures like Nathalie Sarraute. The book’s last major episode before the final act is supplied by the 1980 Lillian Hellman libel suit, when she sued McCarthy for repeating on television what she’d already said in print – that every word Hellman wrote was a ...”

“... blamed the realist tradition for fostering this illusion; his fellow nouveau romancier Nathalie Sarraute thought that fiction had grown up since the days of Balzac – see Kafka’s K, or Faulkner’s slippery use of character names. But even the most high-minded formalists ought to accept that characters don’t abide by the rules, and that ...”

“... to stage a writers’ congress in Havana and to invite a few foreign writers of note, such as Nathalie Sarraute, who were sympathisers of the Revolution but not necessarily Communists. In the meantime, in some kind of political montage (hooves of Klansmen’s horses galloping, then cut to damsel in distress, then cut to threatening blackamoor), Lunes ...”

“... an adviser to Lindon, Robbe-Grillet began shepherding to publication the novels of Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget and Marguerite Duras, who were soon known as the ‘école de Minuit’. These writers drew on different models, but with their detached sensibility and rejection of 19th-century dramatic conventions, they had ...”

“... stories was turned down twice. She began relationships with some of her other pupils, among them Nathalie Sorokine (who called her ‘a clock in a refrigerator’ for the way she divided her time between her lovers and her work, brooking no deviation), and Bianca Bienefeld, whom Sartre seduced (once Beauvoir had told him how to go about it). He also began a ...”