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Beckett's work.
Beckett has also composed in two tongues, has overseen
the Englishing of his French works. In which language have you
read him?
I've read him in both French and English. Beckett's French
is a schoolmaster's French, a preserved French, but in English
you feel the moisture of verbal association and of the
spreading live roots of his prose.
I have a "theory" that the French translation of
Despair (1939)-- not to mention the books she could have
read in Russian-- exerted a great influence on the so-called
New Novel. In his Preface to Mme. Sarraute's Portrait d'un
inconnu (1947), Sartre includes you among the antinovelists,
a rather more intelligent remark-- don't you think?-- than his
comments of eight years before when, reviewing Despair,
he said that as an emigre writer-- landless-- you bad no
subject matter. "But what is the question?" you might ask at
this point. Is Nabokov precursor of the French New Novel?
Answer: The French New Novel does not really exist apart
from a little heap of dust and fluff in a fouled pigeonhole.
But what do you think of Sartre's remark?
Nothing. I'm immune to any kind of opinion and I just
don't know what an "anti-novel" is specifically. Every original
novel is "anti-" because it does not resemble the genre or kind
of its predecessor.
/ know that you admire Robbe-Grillet. What about some
of the others loosely grouped under the "New Novel" tag: Claude
Simon? Michel Butor? and Raymond Queneau, a wonderful writer,
who, while not a member of l'йcole, anticipates it in
several ways?
Queneau's Exercices de style is a thrilling
masterpiece and, in fact, one of the greatest stories in French