Mobile: A Novel (French Literature Series)

 
Considered by many to be his greatest book, Michel Butor's Mobile is the result of the six months the author spent traveling across America. The text is composed from a wide range of materials, including city names, road signs, advertising slogans, catalog listings, newspaper accounts of the 1893 World's Fair, Native American writings, and the history of the Freedomland theme park. Butor weaves bits and pieces from these diverse sources into a collage resembling an abstract painting (the book is dedicated to Jackson Pollock) or a patchwork quilt that by turns is both humorous and quite disturbing. This travelogue captures--in both a textual and visual way--the energy and contradictions of American life and history.
Review
With a lexicographer's zest for words, Butor . . . captures the tone of American cliches, suggests an almost dizzying sense of space and variety, and brings into ironic juxtaposition elements of primitiveness and sophistication that are part of the American myth.

A gifted disciple of French anti-novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, Butor is notable because he uses a different technique with every book and turns out intense and interesting fiction just the same.

"With a lexicographer's zest for words, Butor...captures the tone of American cliches, suggests an almost dizzying sense of space and variety, and brings into ironic juxtaposition elements of primitiveness and sophistication that are part of the American myth."
About the Author
Michel Butor (1926) est l'auteur d'une oeuvre considerable de plus de six cents livres, parmi lesquels des romans, notamment"La Modification"(prix Renaudot, 1957), des recueil de poesies, dont le fameux "Travaux d'approche"(1972), de nombreux essais, comme"Improvisations sur Flaubert"(1989) et"Improvisations sur Rimbaud" (1989). Il est le dernier grand representant de l'ecole du Nouveau Roman.

Brassai (born Gyula Halasz, 1899-1984) was a photographer, journalist, and author of photographic monographs and literary works, including "Letters to My Parents" and "Conversations with Picasso," both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Richard Howard, a professor at the School of the Arts at Columbia University, is an award-winning poet and translator. His translations include books by Gide, Cocteau, Giraudoux, De Beauvoir, Barthes, Cioran, and Proust, and Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal," for which he received the American Book Award.

John D'Agata is the author of About a Mountain, Halls of Fame and editor of The Next American Essay and The Lost Origins of the Essay. He teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he lives.

EAN: 9781564783431

Package Dimensions: 9.0 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches

Languages: English