Enfance

Octavo, 257 pages. Paperback copy, uncut.

217 x 147 mm.

Sarraute, Nathalie. Childhood.Gallimard, 1983.

First edition of Nathalie Sarraute’s masterpiece.

One of 37 copies on Arches vellum, the only large paper edition. This copy is no. 16.

“Sarraute’s masterpiece is also a poetic art. It is unique. It is a purification, even a distillation in the alchemical sense of the word, of her earlier writings. Mobile, lucid, and poetic, without the slightest pathos, Sarraute allows the reader to absorb and savor the words/objects/sensations that line her memories, all the more powerfully because, through her anguish, Sarraute has become more humanized. One senses the blood warming in Childhood, never overtly, but subtly, in depth, because it comes from a genuinely lived experience and not an intellectual construction. The alchemist Sarraute has created her Philosopher’s Stone” (Bettina Liebowitz Knapp).

Childhood is an autobiographical narrative by Nathalie Sarraute, recounting her first 12 years.

The author engages in a dialogue with herself, in search of ...