The Planetarium deals with various mundane events in the lives of a young married couple (the wife’s negotiations with her mother about the purchase of some Louis XVth armchairs, the husband’s attempts to make it as a man of letters, their joint scheme to take over the apartment of an elderly aunt and so on) and it does this from the perspective of each character’s internal consciousness, so that the story itself has to be inferred from long, meandering chains of association.


The general mood is uneasy at the best of times and often slides into terror, Sarraute’s basic premise being that social intercourse is a flimsy web of codes and conventions, ‘below it, the void.’ People live, think and speak in total isolation, even if they do these in conjunction with others, because ‘total fusion exists with no-one.’ In fact, other people are most often experienced as aggression; a dinner party is described as a covert war, conversation as a mined terrain and the aunt awaits her nephew as ‘an aged wild boar when it turns and sits facing the pack.’


A famous woman writer appears as a sort of Prospero figure, a symbolic author-within-the-novel who, compared by others to Madame Tussaud because of her ability to create lifelike characters, feels herself and her words to be more like the empty wax dummies than their creator. But she writes on, searching in language for the antidote to the poison which that very language is.

‘Orders... that’s all they understand... automatons, blind insensitive machines, pillaging, destroying everything... With orders they can be made to do almost anything, burn cathedrals, books, blow up the Parthenon... it’s useless to attempt to appeal to them, to humanize them...’ p15