Recommendations
Books Like La Modification by Michel Butor
Novels that make the reader the protagonist
La Modification uses the second person to place the reader inside a consciousness suspended between two cities, two women, two lives. These novels share that same formal technique of implicating the reader in the story's unfolding.
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Buy on AmazonLa Jalousie
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The nouveau roman masterpiece — the formal counterpart to La Modification; the absent-present narrator and obsessive geometric description; equally suspended but from pure surface
- 2
Buy on AmazonIf on a winter's night a traveler
by Italo Calvino
The Italian postmodernist novel in the second person — a reader who keeps beginning novels that are interrupted; the Italian extension of the Butor second-person technique
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Buy on AmazonL'Emploi du temps
by Michel Butor
Passing Time — Butor's novel of an English industrial city; a maze of time and memory; the immediate predecessor to La Modification in formal development
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Buy on AmazonThe Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Faulkner's novel of multiple temporal planes and consciousness — the American model that Butor and Claude Simon both acknowledge as the formal precedent for the nouveau roman
- 5Buy on Amazon
Tropismes
by Nathalie Sarraute
The founding text of the same French movement — Sarraute's approach through sub-conversation rather than formal narration; the essential context for La Modification
- 6
Buy on AmazonLa Route des Flandres
by Claude Simon
The Nobel Prize masterpiece of the nouveau roman — the sustained Faulknerian sentences and multiple temporal planes that La Modification prefigures more accessibly
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Buy on AmazonRépertoire I
by Michel Butor
Butor's theoretical essays — the account of the novel as exploration that makes explicit what La Modification demonstrates formally
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Buy on AmazonMobile
by Michel Butor
Butor's most formally extreme work — a study of the United States in cut-up fragments; the outer limit of the formal development La Modification begins
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