I still struggle with Sarraute. The characters here are cruel, vindictive, and afraid. The text is written mostly as confused inner monologue. Every character here is prone to catastrophizing around the smallest gesture or faux pas. It makes for (intentionally) tough reading.

Though the perspective shifts between characters, they all have this catastrophizing in common. If it's a comment on a larger bourgeois condition, and I think it must be, it does get a little exhausting after a few hundred pages. Again, intentionally I'm sure.

Each character is loosely aware of their own illness. That's compelling! To recognize your behavior as unwell while it occurs (or even before), and fail to adjust for it, or adjust for it in a way that only makes things worse? These are difficult things.

The self-awareness of each character's reactions and behavior as "incorrect" or bearing the markings of impropriety, weakness, or mania comes and goes. The narration spirals between denial, negotiation, externalization, self-concern, acceptance, and denial again. These thoughts interrupt one another. They clash violently with what came before, and rationalize and disregard themselves from clause to clause. It's an interesting effect. That kind of ever-shifting perspective, blurred and warped in illness, of oneself outside oneself, resonates with me. But sitting down and reading it? Not so fun.