La Modification Reading Order

La Modification (A Change of Heart, 1957) by Michel Butor is the most celebrated of his four novels and one of the most formally audacious works of the Nouveau Roman. Narrated entirely in the second person singular — 'vous' in the French, translated as 'you' in English — La Modification follows Léon Delmont, a middle-aged Parisian who is travelling by train from Paris to Rome with the intention of persuading his Roman mistress Cécile to come back to Paris and live with him openly, ending his marriage. Over the course of the journey, as the train passes through the French and Italian landscapes and as Léon drifts between sleep, reverie, and waking observation of his fellow passengers, he changes his mind. By the time he reaches Rome, he knows that he will not carry out his plan. The novel tracks this gradual 'modification' — the title's word — through the accumulating pressure of memory and imagination rather than through any external event. The second-person narrative form — which Butor chose deliberately, as a way of keeping the reader inside the protagonist's consciousness without the distancing of third person or the limitation of first — is both the novel's most distinctive formal feature and its central argument: the novel is about the way consciousness modifies itself from the inside, how a decision already made can become unmade through the experience of sustained attention. La Modification won the Prix Renaudot in 1957.