"The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading"
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Sarraute isn’t flattering readers here; she’s recruiting them. The line presses against the consumer model of culture, where a book is supposed to deliver a pre-packaged experience on demand. Instead, she insists reading is co-authorship: if you want the work to live, you have to lend it your attention, your imagination, your willingness to sit with ambiguity long enough for meaning to form.
That demand makes sense coming from Sarraute, a major figure of the nouveau roman, whose fiction often refuses the easy furniture of plot and psychological backstory. Her writing is built out of micro-movements of feeling and half-formed impulses. It doesn’t “perform” in the usual way; it waits. The subtext is almost combative: if you’re bored, it might not be the book failing to entertain you - it might be you arriving with the wrong contract.
Her phrasing is tellingly physical: “make the thing alive.” Reading becomes less like decoding and more like animation, the way an actor animates a script or a musician a score. The “work” she describes isn’t schoolwork or dutiful annotation; it’s the labor of presence, of bringing your own interiority to meet the text’s. In a century shaped by mass media’s frictionless pleasures, Sarraute draws a line: art that matters is not a product you consume, it’s a relation you sustain. The payoff is freedom - but only for readers willing to earn it.
That demand makes sense coming from Sarraute, a major figure of the nouveau roman, whose fiction often refuses the easy furniture of plot and psychological backstory. Her writing is built out of micro-movements of feeling and half-formed impulses. It doesn’t “perform” in the usual way; it waits. The subtext is almost combative: if you’re bored, it might not be the book failing to entertain you - it might be you arriving with the wrong contract.
Her phrasing is tellingly physical: “make the thing alive.” Reading becomes less like decoding and more like animation, the way an actor animates a script or a musician a score. The “work” she describes isn’t schoolwork or dutiful annotation; it’s the labor of presence, of bringing your own interiority to meet the text’s. In a century shaped by mass media’s frictionless pleasures, Sarraute draws a line: art that matters is not a product you consume, it’s a relation you sustain. The payoff is freedom - but only for readers willing to earn it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
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