orig. Nathalie Ilyanova Tcherniak
born July 18, 1900, Ivanova, Russia
died Oct. 19, 1999, Paris, France
French novelist and essayist.
She practiced law until 0441; 1940, when she became a full-time writer. Tropismes (1939), a collection of sketches, introduced her idea of tropisms, the "things that are not said and the movements that cross our consciousness very rapidly." An early practitioner and leading theorist of the nouveau roman ("new novel"), the French antinovel , she discarded conventions of plot, chronology, characterization, and point of view. Her novels
including Portrait of a Man Unknown (1948), Martereau (1953), Le planétarium (1959), and Here (1997)
and her plays focus on the unspoken "subconversations" in human interactions.