Word: butors
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...Swedish Academy last week finally awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to French Novelist Claude Simon, 72, the news seemed both , inevitable and a little outdated. Simon had a period of modest renown during the 1950s and early '60s. Along with Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, he became a chief exponent of the French nouveau roman, a form of fiction that rigorously questioned traditional narrative devices. Reality, so the Gallic logic went, is not easy to read. Simon has proved himself just as good and as exhausting as the form that he helped to develop...
...novels, probably because the Italian language has become over-rhetorical." Like Steiner, Kaiser is impressed by the intellectual ferment in France, particularly "the discussions influenced by Claude Levi-Strauss and the structuralists on one side and the Sartre pupils on the other." But except for the novels of Michel Butor and Claude Simon, whom he considers the most talented exponents of the nouveau roman, the "new novel" that is no longer very new, he is unimpressed with French belles-lettres. "One can already find an epitaph for the new novel-'too boring...
Since the decline of literary existentialism, French fiction has been dominated by four authors-Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Butor and Duras-who write the anti-roman, the non-novel in which characters are impersonal, time floats out the window, and action is as fragmented as a cracked kaleidoscope. The casual reader may well have trouble telling one anti-novelist from another, but in the case of Marguerite Duras, the problem is simple: she is the only natural writer. The others construct fiction to demonstrate a pet theory. She writes about people and their moods with incomparable ease and sensuality...
...slender pejorative burden of Butor's book is contained in interwoven excerpts from a terrifying Salem witch trial, historical notes on the ill-treatment of American Indians, liberal quotes from the prospectus of Freedomland, U.S.A., and offerings from the views of various Southerners (real and imagined) on the Negro. Among them is one from that conscientious democrat Thomas Jefferson, who concluded, ". . . their inferiority is not the effect, merely, of their condition of life...
...Butor's crime is not his adverse opinion of the U.S: It is that he has done what no honest Frenchman should do -watered his whine. Mobile outrageously pads about 20 pages of real reporting and social commentary into a 319-page, $6 book...