Michel Butor Critical Essay | Critical Review by Michael Bishop

Critical Review by Michael Bishop

SOURCE: Bishop, Michael. Review of Mais où sont les rouilles d'antan, by Michel Butor. World Literature Today 74, no. 3 (summer 2000): 631.

In the following review, Bishop praises Mais où sont les rouilles d'antan for its scope and levity.

This is a book, composed of nine at once concise and ample half-versified texts, by one of the most delightfully and richly multifocused writers of a century to which Mais où sont les rouilles d'antan is, in effect, dedicated. Illustrated by Joël Leick, Michel Butor's nine daily recordings—the first one, barely warming up, harking back some hundred years or so, notes, “Butin du lundi au fond de la cour: / des clous, des écrous, des grilles et des capsules. / Adieu prétendue belle époque / aujourd'hui voici près d'un siècle / Un pas”—move progressively through the flickering images of the century's “moments,” juxtaposed as they are with the quick contextualizations...
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