L'Emploi du temps Reading Order

L'Emploi du temps (Passing Time, 1956) by Michel Butor is the most formally complex of his novels and, for many readers, his greatest achievement. Jacques Revel, a young French employee, arrives in the English industrial city of Bleston (based on Manchester) to work for a commercial firm and begins, six months into his year's stay, to write a diary of his experience. But the diary is written retrospectively — Revel is always writing about what happened months ago, from a present that is itself receding into the past — and this temporal displacement creates a structure in which the present moment of writing, the recent past being described, and the more distant past that the description keeps uncovering are all simultaneously in play. Butor adds further complications: Revel has read a detective novel set in Bleston (the fictional Bleston Murder by J.C. Hamilton), and the city of the novel begins to superimpose itself on the real city; he has befriended two sisters, one of whom he loves, in a relationship that becomes increasingly tangled; and the city of Bleston itself — rainy, labyrinthine, resistant to being known — functions as a kind of antagonist, a place that deliberately conceals itself from the outsider who is trying to understand it. L'Emploi du temps is among the most ambitious attempts in post-war French fiction to represent the experience of living in, and failing to understand, an unfamiliar place.