Michel Butor - Böcker

This book gathers French writer Michel Butor's essays on his travel in the Mediterranean. Included are pieces on Cordova, Istanbul, Salonica, Delphi, Crete, and northern Italy, as well as an extended essay on Egypt—where, when he was 24, Butor spent a year teaching French in a secondary school. Michel Butor is one of the leading exponents of the avant-garde writing that emerged in France in the 1950s.

Like James Joyce’s and Dylan Thomas’s similar titles, Butor’s novel is autobiographical in nature and explores the way a writer develops. Shortly after World War II a young man travels to a castle in Franconia housing the second largest private library in Germany. There he discovers a multitude of stimuli for his imagination: a castle once the site of celebrations and executions, the old library, mineral collections, rooms decorated in mythological themes, and an exiled count who has a passion for highly original games of solitaire.Days are spent in the library steeping himself in the literature of alchemy, whose great theme was transformation. At night, the young man dreams he is in an adventure that begins as a vampire story and ends as a tale from The Thousand and One Nights, in which a young man is transformed into an ape.Bordering between autobiography and elements of Gothic horror, this “caprice” shows the development as a young man of one of France’s most important contemporary novelists during and just after World War II. Though as readers we have as hard a time as Butor himself in separating fact from fantasy, we see the young Butor on the edges of the intellectual and artistic circles of his time (Martin Heidegger and Andre Breton make brief appearances), but we witness this in an ominous, sinister atmosphere where we expect Dracula to step from around the corner at any moment, accompanied by Abbott and Costello.In brief, this is autobiography as if invented by H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and Edgar Allan Poe, and then as reinvented by the French New Novelists, with one further layer supplied by Mel Brooks: just what autobiography should read like when recapturing the sense of life in Nazi-dominated Europe where history, fact, illusion, myth, dreams, legends, black magic, and memory become indistinguishable.First published in 1967, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape may well be one of the most captivating works about the growth of a writer’s imagination.

On Tuesday, October 12, 1954, Pierre Vernier, a teacher in a Paris lyc?e, begins setting down an account that is to be a complete record of the life lived by himself, his students, and his fellow teachers. He begins by meticulously recording what he already knows of his students, their relationships to one another, and the books they're studying. Then he's forced to enlist his nephew--who's in his class--to report on the private lives of the other boys. To record all reality, he must know all that has passed, is passing, and will pass through his pupils' minds. Degrees is an extraordinary novel exposing one man's obsessive project, the impossibility of its completion, and the damaging effect this obsession has on both Vernier and those who surround him.