Recommendations
Books Like Degrés by Michel Butor
Books for readers who loved the impossible description and Butor's novel about the limits of omniscience
Degrés (1960) is Butor's most formally ambitious novel — a teacher attempts to write an exhaustive description of a single hour of school, discovering that complete description is impossible as context expands without limit. These 8 books share its meditation on the limits of knowledge and description, its interest in collective education, and its formal argument about the impossibility of the omniscient narrator.
- 1
Buy on AmazonLa Modification
by Michel Butor
The recommended starting Butor — the Prix Renaudot winner and the most widely read; read before Degrés as the easier introduction to the Butor method.
- 2
Buy on AmazonL'Emploi du temps
by Michel Butor
The formal middle ground — more complex than La Modification, less extreme than Degrés; the natural path to Degrés.
- 3
Buy on AmazonLes Fruits d'or
by Nathalie Sarraute
The Nouveau Roman companion on the limits of description — Sarraute's novel about the reception of a novel shares Degrés's argument that any attempt to describe a cultural act from the inside expands without resolution.
- 4Buy on Amazon
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
A walk that expands into an almost limitless accumulation of historical and personal digression — Sebald's method of expansion shares Degrés's demonstration that description, once begun, cannot be stopped.
- 5
Buy on AmazonInfinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
The American maximalist novel about a school, a tennis academy, and the limits of entertainment culture — Wallace's footnote-heavy style and his attempt to describe everything shares the formal ambition of Degrés, though from an American rather than French Nouveau Roman tradition.
- 6
Buy on AmazonMiddlemarch
by George Eliot
The great Victorian omniscient narrator's admission of her own limitation — George Eliot's famous claim that she could have written many novels about the minor characters is the Victorian version of the problem that Butor's Degrés makes central.
- 7
Buy on AmazonTristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne
A narrator who cannot complete his autobiography because the more he writes, the further behind he falls — the eighteenth-century predecessor to Degrés's formal argument that complete description outruns the time available to complete it.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Complete Works of Primo Levi
by Primo Levi
The exhaustive testimony as formal project — Levi's commitment to describing the Lager completely, through all available modes (memoir, chemistry, fiction, essay), is the moral version of the formal project that Degrés explores through a teacher and his students.
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