ABSTRACT
Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99) devoted her life to tropisms. Her unique view of the mind is the central concern of each of her thirteen prose works and six plays, and of almost all of her essays. Childhood is Sarraute's tenth prose work, published when the writer was in her early eighties, although still with sixteen years of creativity, three further prose texts and a play ahead of her. It recommends itself largely for being her best-known and most widely read text, perhaps because its autobiographical subject matter is more accessible than her sometimes disorienting fiction with its anonymous voices and undetermined situations. Childhood is also Sarraute's only non-fiction narrative, which means that, like Breton's Mad Love, it is not only a creative imagining of consciousness, but also a declaration that the representation reflects the workings of a real mind, that tropisms are not poetic fancy but genuine mental phenomena that exist in Sarraute's mind.
