For over forty years Nathalie Sarraute has been writing about 'tropisms', the name she has given to what lies underneath the words, gestures and facial expressions that come to the surface when we communicate with others or react to their communications with us…. She will not be distracted by conventional ideas of character and plot. She tries to stay entirely in her world of 'the secret source'. It is interesting that among the writers whom Sarraute admires are Virginia Woolf (were 'the waves' tropisms?) and Ivy Compton-Burnett. In an essay in Nouvelle Revue Française in 1956 Sarraute praised Compton-Burnett for her conversations that 'are located not in an imaginary place but in a place that actually exists: somewhere on the fluctuating frontier that separates conversation from sub-conversation'. (p. 90)

What do the tropisms themselves look like?… In her first book, which she called Tropismes, and which she says she...