Life & Mortality Quote by Nathalie Sarraute

The novel is “dead” the way every medium is “dead” right up until someone sells you twelve more of it. Sarraute’s dry little shrug punctures a familiar cultural ritual: declaring an art form obsolete as a shortcut to sounding historically awake. Her tone is lawyerly in the best sense - skeptical, evidentiary, impatient with grand pronouncements that can’t survive contact with observable fact. If the case for the novel’s demise is so strong, why is the docket still jammed?

The line works because it treats “death” as rhetoric, not reality. “I have often heard” frames the obituary as hearsay, a rumor passed around salons and newspapers, less diagnosis than performance. Then she pivots to the most deflationary proof possible: sheer volume. “I don’t know how many a week” isn’t even a statistic; it’s the weary sense of abundance you only get when something is thriving enough to be mundane.

Context matters. Sarraute, associated with the French nouveau roman, lived through repeated panics about the novel’s exhaustion: after modernism, after the war, amid the rise of cinema and then television. Her subtext isn’t that everything is fine; it’s that the form survives by mutating, even when critics can’t recognize the new organism. “Carrying along quite well” reads almost dismissive, but it’s also a quiet rebuke to gatekeepers: the novel doesn’t need permission to continue. It just keeps showing up, weekly, like a stubborn habit or a necessary vice.