[L'Usage de la parole] is a delectably austere, beady-eyed book, short and with no word roman or récits on the cover to say that it is fiction. Roman it is not, récits hardly; but fiction yes, and, as always with Mme. Sarraute, of the rarest, most moral kind. There are ten brief sections, each with its own epigraph of some commonplace phrase or group of words.

The first of these is in German, "Ich sterbe", the German for "I am dying" and the last words spoken by Chekhov on his deathbed at Badenweiler, the spa to which he had despairingly gone for the sake of his health. They have the pathos of all recorded last words, but made keener by the fact that for Chekhov they were a literal alienation of his thoughts, since he spoke them in German not his native Russian. From this Sarraute...