This is a remarkable and difficult book. Here, language is the main protagonist, and the author explores the various hidden meanings behind everyday speech. There are twenty chapters here, each progressively more complex than the last, but each beginning with a deceptively simple proposition. Reading her style can be frustrating. This book may require a couple times through, page by page, to reveal the structure of Sarraute's masterful writing.
Narrators shift, meaning is put into words or phrases where none seemed to be from the start.
One imagines the narrators to be eminently frustrating people to talk to. Yet there are entertaining passages to which anyone who has ever been frustrated by a forgotten word could relate. In the end, there is a sinister darkness shooting through the whole book. Sarraute reveals some of this, but the exploration seems only to have begun.