The Planetarium

"It fulfills ideally the dream of Flaubert and Mallarmé, dreamed again by their Irish and Czech admirers, Joyce and Kafka, of a novel made out of nothing and in which events are next to nothing."—New York Times The best thing about Nathalie Sarraute is her stumbling, groping style, with its honesty and numerous misgivings, a style that approaches the object with reverent precautions, withdraws from it suddenly out of a sort of modesty, or through timidity before its complexity, then, when all is said and done, suddenly presents us with the drooling monster, almost without having touched it, through the magic of an image."—Jean-Paul Sartre "The Planetarium is a wonderfully believable account of a short, sharp struggle between an exploitative young man with literary ambitions nad his rich, domineering relatives.."—New Yorker