Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute

 

I hope I am not exaggerating when saying that French women writers like Annie Ernaux or Nathalie Sarraute revolutionized the ways in which memoirs are written, how memory is reproduced into the later literary, worded transposition of ideas.

Childhood/Enfance by Nathalie Sarraute is written as a dialogue between the author and her questioning self, as she is mostly randomly bringing back to life fragments of life as a child split between two cultures and languages - Russian and French. The memorialistic aspect of her writing, the so-called ´memoir´ is more than a transcription of facts for resisting the passing of time; it is in fact a re-enacting of thoughts she had about her past, a memory of the memories she preserved at different levels of subjective perception, from the early childhood until her literary age at the time of the writing.

However, through questioning, she is breaking the train of homogenous, over-subjective writing. Questioning helps her to challenge her own narrative, that may be further subject to change, as the ideas and the memory of the memory changes itself. 

Childhood is a rich book both in terms of method and content, a literary example and a unique story of a child caught in-between languages, parents and historical occurrences. 

Rating: 4.5 stars