The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 24 November 2008
by Michel Butor
Michel Butor has long been known as an experimental writer and, though he resists the title, belongs, more or less, to the post-WW2 group of French nouveau roman writers. His novels are intense, ornate, dense and expressive. In this short 1958 collection, he has assembled a set of loosely associated essays on cities and villages he has resided in or visited around the Mediterranean. He starts out admiring the cathedral/mosque of Cordoba, Spain. He moves on to the gritty convoluted mess that is Istanbul and envokes the Greek city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) through a visit to a small ancient chapel. When he travels to Delphi, he reflects on its mythical history and the story of the great Oracle, while leaving us with a witty turn on his knowledge of the topic. The longest essay, on Egypt, takes up fully half of this slender book. In the 1950s (apparently), Butor was a teacher in an Egyptian lyceé in the small city of Al Minya, on the west bank of the Nile. Here he laments that he doesn't do justice to his experiences in Egypt, but the essay is still impressionistic and generous to the alien land he found himself in. He tells us of the classes he teaches, the hashish he smokes, and the monuments he visits on the edge of the desert and in Cairo. He also writes emotionally of the clash between European and Egyptian and Muslim values. And he still comes away feeling attached to the foreign land. It is hard not to think about Flaubert's Egypt while reading this. Butor rounds out the book with three short fragmentary essays on Mallia, Mantua and Ferrara, little vignettes that reveal, a bit, the writer's process.
(This book was translated from the French by Lydia Davis.)
Also by Butor: [Passing Time] [Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape]