Another lovely little gem from Nathalie Sarraute. I snagged a hardcover first edition of this one at the thrift store for only $3! Was thrilled as it's one of the few novels of hers that I own back in Florence but haven't yet gotten around to reading, so win/win, I got a nice book to add to my library and also something to read these months abroad and away from my library.

Written in Sarraute's usual no exposition, impressionistic style of thoughts and dialogue attributed to nameless hes, shes, and mostly theys, Do You Hear Them? (from 1972) deals with the generation gap, pitting the seriousness of an art collector father and an unspecified number of giggling daughters, the "plot" centering around a family-owned work of Mesoamerican sculpture and the daughters' laughter--which prompts the father to exclaim the novel's title to a visiting friend. In classic Sarraute fashion, this laughter and the father's attitudes toward his daughters are spun again and again as per their intentions, exploring the dynamics between them, the love, suspicion, duty, resentment, differences, education, culture, as pivots between one generation and the other, one gender and the other, etc. etc. It drags just a bit about 2/3 of the way through, but the ending was wonderful and, by then, I'd really came to admire the concise whole of it. For me this is one of Sarraute's best novels.