Ere Du Soupcon

This is a short, compact little book. Sarraute wrote it on the hinge of the century; the moderns had come & gone. Faced with the paradox that "we can't re-do what Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Proust did, because that would clearly be perceived as copying innovators, but Tolstoy and Stendahl's traditional techniques are copied every day," Sarraute urges further innovation, up to and including the excision of the "he said" part of dialog. In doing so she explicates, to a certain degree, the processes that brought her to the unique style and technique evidenced in her novels.