Recommendations
Books Like L'Emploi du temps by Michel Butor
Books for readers who loved the Bleston labyrinth and Butor's most formally complex portrait of being a foreigner in an industrial city
L'Emploi du temps (1956) is Butor's most formally complex novel — a French employee in the English industrial city of Bleston keeps a retrospective diary over a year, creating a temporal structure where multiple pasts coexist with the present of writing. These 8 books share its portrait of a foreigner failing to understand a city, its diary form, and its meditation on temporal layering.
- 1
Buy on AmazonLa Modification
by Michel Butor
The companion Butor novel — the Prix Renaudot winner and the more widely read entry into the Butor method; read before L'Emploi du temps if you want the easier introduction.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Trial
by Franz Kafka
A man in a city that refuses to yield its logic to him — Kafka's labyrinthine bureaucratic city and Butor's labyrinthine Bleston share the same quality of deliberate opacity to the person trying to navigate them.
- 3Buy on Amazon
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald
A narrator who has been in a city (London) for decades and is still trying to understand it — Sebald's meditative architectural prose shares L'Emploi du temps's interest in how a city resists being fully known.
- 4Buy on Amazon
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A man writing retrospectively about events he is still living through — the Russian predecessor to the temporal complexity of L'Emploi du temps, in which the act of writing both describes and distorts what it describes.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe Diary of a Nobody
by George Grossmith
The British comic version of the diary form in an industrial city — Pooter's London diary as the comic precursor to Revel's Bleston diary; both are about a man's attempt to impose meaning on an environment that doesn't care.
- 6
Buy on AmazonJealousy
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
The Nouveau Roman companion — the same formal refusal of conventional narrative clarity, using a different strategy (obsessive visual description) to approach the same problem of a consciousness that cannot access the reality it is surrounded by.
- 7
Buy on AmazonLolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
A man in an unfamiliar America writing a retrospective account of events he is still trying to understand — Nabokov's use of retrospective narration to reveal character shares L'Emploi du temps's interest in the gap between what is happening and what is being written about it.
- 8Buy on Amazon
The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
A walk along the Suffolk coast that expands into European history — the closest British equivalent to the way L'Emploi du temps allows the texture of an English landscape to expand into everything the observer brings to it.
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