Nathalie Sarraute; French Pioneer of the ‘New Novel’

Nathalie Sarraute, the internationally known French writer who pioneered the “New Novel” movement that downplayed plot, characters and their actions in favor of their underlying thoughts and emotions, died Wednesday at her home in Paris. She was 99.

“We have lost one of the greatest writers of the century,” said French President Jacques Chirac.

Sarraute, a lawyer before turning to prose, published 10 novels, six books of literary criticism, several plays and an autobiography, “Childhood,” which was adapted into a play starring Glenn Close in 1985.

The author’s books have been translated into 26 languages, and her complete works were republished in 1997. Although Sarraute had become something of a recluse in recent years, she was working on a new book at the time of her death.

“I just don’t believe that you can write stories anymore as they once were written,” she said in discussing the New Novel movement for The Times in 1975 after appearing as a guest lecturer at UC Irvine. “Just as the artist is free to do an abstract painting, the writer should be free to develop a new type of novel.

“The reader [of traditional novels] passes through the language in order to get at what the story is saying,” she said. “We don’t look at how it is said.”

Other writers in the movement have included Samuel Beckett, Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and Claude Ollier.

Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote an introduction to Sarraute’s “Portrait of a Man Unknown,” described her work as “anti-novels” that aim “to make use of the novel in order to challenge the novel, to destroy it before our very eyes. . . . “

Former Times book editor Robert R. Kirsch described “Portrait,” however, as “an experimental extension of the novel, hard to read but rewarding in the process, searching to communicate to the reader a truth of experience and insight.”

Critics often saw Sarraute’s work in that vein--difficult to read but well worth the effort, offering sometimes painful but often humorous and poetic visions of life.

In reviewing Sarraute’s novel “Between Life and Death” for The Times in 1969, James E. Martin commented that “style becomes content, and the book is less a novel than a protracted prose poem on the theme of [literary] creation . . . must reading for anyone who writes or has ever dreamed of writing.”

Sarraute’s first book, “Tropisms,” was published in 1939 and set the tone for her future work. She borrowed the title from the biological term describing the natural turning of plants and animals toward sunlight or other stimuli--as good a description as any of her efforts to describe the impulses and emotions prompting characters to say or do something.

Another of her best-known novels is “The Golden Fruits,” published in 1963 and involving the reaction of a group of writers and intellectuals and hangers-on to a novel, which might be interpreted as the public’s reception of Sarraute’s work. Her novel “You Don’t Love Yourself” was published in 1990, the same year she became a nonagenarian.

Sarraute established herself with the literati with her first book of criticism, “The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel,” in 1963.

She was born Nathalie Tcherniak on July 18, 1900, in Ivanovo, Russia, the daughter of a chemist father and novelist mother who divorced when she was 2. She shuttled between the two remarried parents in France and Russia for several years, eventually making her own life in Paris. Her book “Childhood” described her meaningful early struggles with balancing two households, two countries and two languages.

After studying English literature at the Sorbonne, history at Oxford and sociology in Berlin, she returned to the Sorbonne to earn a law degree. There she met and married Raymond Sarraute, a lawyer. She practiced law in Paris from 1926 to 1932, and gave birth to the couple’s three daughters, Claude, Anne and Dominique, during that period.

She began work on “Tropisms” in 1932. World War II interrupted her writing career for a few years, and at one point the Jewish Sarraute had to pose as the governess of her own children to survive in German-occupied France.

Among Sarraute’s awards were the International Prize of Literature, the National Grand Prize, the Cavour Prize and the Formentor prize.