Recommendations
Books Like La Modification by Michel Butor
Books for readers who loved the second-person train journey and Butor's portrait of a decision unmade
La Modification (1957) is Butor's Prix Renaudot novel — a man on a Paris-to-Rome train who has decided to bring his mistress back to Paris gradually changes his mind, narrated in the second person 'vous'. These 8 books share its train journey structure, its portrait of a decision unmade, and its study of a consciousness in the act of self-modification.
- 1
Buy on AmazonL'Emploi du temps
by Michel Butor
The companion Butor novel — more formally complex, but the same meditation on what it means to be a consciousness in an unfamiliar place trying to recover and understand experience through writing.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Degrés
by Michel Butor
The most radical Butor — the second-person technique of La Modification taken to its logical extreme in the attempt to describe a complete hour of school from every possible perspective.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens travelling in the West Country and gradually revealing (to himself and the reader) what he sacrificed — the same structure as La Modification: a journey in which a decision already made is slowly modified by the experience of honest reflection.
- 4
Buy on AmazonStoner
by John Williams
A man whose life-decisions accumulate into a quiet catastrophe he did not choose and could not have avoided — the American version of the same meditative recognition that Léon Delmont reaches by Rome.
- 5Buy on Amazon
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's novella about a man who discovers on his deathbed that his entire life was lived in bad faith — the Russian predecessor to La Modification's secular epiphany about what a life is actually for.
- 6
Buy on AmazonHerzog
by Saul Bellow
Moses Herzog writing letters he never sends while travelling between cities and between possible versions of his life — the American modernist version of the same self-examination that Léon Delmont conducts on the Paris-Rome express.
- 7
Buy on AmazonMrs Bridge
by Evan S. Connell
A woman whose inner life is completely inaccessible to herself — the complement to La Modification's portrait of a man who manages, on one train journey, to become accessible to his own consciousness.
- 8
Buy on AmazonOn Chesil Beach
by Ian McEwan
Two people on a single evening in 1962 and the decision they cannot make — McEwan's compressed study of the moment when a life-path is determined shares La Modification's interest in the decision that cannot be undone once taken.
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