[The central character of Nathalie Sarraute's Between Life and Death] is a writer and her central concern is the "mere complexities, the fury and the mire" of his creative life—the whole thing smacks not of autobiography (too little occurs to justify that word) but of alteregoism. And, as the young Turkish poet Murad Osman-Talaat has written:

… nothing strikes an alteregoist with more horror than the prospect that someone may be converted to his way of seeing….

Miss Sarraute rattles the reader around in this writer's head for nearly two hundred pages without a "conversion," without a coincidence of understanding between reader and character. This is partly the fault of the book's hyperintellectuality, even more of its prose.

Maria Jolas' translation is extraordinarily good, in the somewhat extraordinary sense that it accurately reflects a falling-off in Miss Sarraute's style. Her previous work, especially The Golden Fruits, had a...