Michel Butor would have turned 100 today
French outlets marked the centenary of the writer often called the father of the Nouveau Roman by republishing old interviews, including one in which he embraced the digital age with what Télérama called a teenager's enthusiasm.
Michel Butor was born on September 14, 1926, and would have turned 100 this Monday. To mark the date, both Télérama and Bibliobs (Le Nouvel Obs) went back into their archives rather than commission new coverage.
Télérama republished a 2013 interview, conducted three years before Butor's death, at a time when he was working on the reissue of his complete works. In it, according to the magazine, he spoke with what it described as a teenager's enthusiasm about digital technology, and offered a line about his own reputation: "On dit souvent de moi que je suis un 'inconnu célèbre'" — people often say of me that I am a 'famous unknown'.
Bibliobs went further back, to a 1996 conversation with André Clavel published in Le Nouvel Observateur at the time Butor released the final volume of his series "le Génie du lieu." That same year he had also published "Curriculum vitæ," a book of self-reflection. The magazine's headline calls him the writer who was "at once the least read and the most discussed" of his generation.
Butor is remembered chiefly as one of the figures associated with the Nouveau Roman, alongside writers such as Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Simon, though the two archival pieces published today focus less on that literary history than on giving Butor, in his own words, the last say on how he saw himself.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
