I was struck, while reading this, by the fact that the only action in this book is literally the text, and this happens in a way severely different from other authors who attempt the same goal. There are "things" that happen in the "plot," of course, but these things do not move any sort of mimetic narrative forward, rather, these "things" move the text forward. However, despite this insistence upon the novel as text, writing, what you end up 'getting out of' the novel upon it's close is really more of an idea than a technique: you are confronted with the issue of empty criticism, social class elitism, intellectual snobbery. There are no lines drawn in terms of this is bad or this is good, but you view these things at the point of view of the text and so you become actively engaged in, basically, trying to determine bullshit. You experience embarrassment, you have to make your own decisions regarding the cultural worth of an apocryphal work. But it's in such an unselfconscious level, Sarraute's intense control is almost incredible.

The setting of Nathalie Sarraute's Do You Hear Them? is a dinner conversation between a father and his old friend about a recently acquired pre-Columbian statue. As they discuss the merits of the piece and art in general, the father hears his children upstairs giggling. This childish mirth is barbaric and devastating to the father, for in their laughter he hears them mocking his "old-fashioned" viewpoint and the energy he wastes by collecting lifeless objects. In his mind, they have no respect for what has been of greatest importance in his life.

"In this classic later work from French novelist Nathalie Sarraute, one finds a "delectably austere, beady-eyed book.... Phrases that give rise to the scenes or episodes are ordinary enough until Sarraute imagines for them a context which turns them from bland civilities into weapons of psychological warfare. Friends meet and converse, in a cafe or in the street, and are all sociability; except underneath, where the best of friends can be the most savage of opponents. Sarraute resorts sardonically to metaphor to indicate what words will not capture: the shameful and ineffable animosities that...imperil our urbanity"--The Times Literary Supplement

A series of sketches on French salon life. One chronicles a room's reaction to a man with the nobiliary particle de in his name--from fawning to hate.