As usual, I follow my instinct with reasons I don’t know why. Reading, to me, is going on a reading pattern without a map. John Ashbery mentions Michel Butor and his novel Changing Track in a book of his essays and reviews, Selected Prose, and what he wrote caught my attention immediately. Before I even finished his article, I ordered the Butor book online. Ashbery describes the narration as a businessman traveling from his home, Paris, to Rome on a train to see his mistress. In detail, and told in the second person, we observe Léon Delmont observing others on the train trip, and him reflecting on his life working in a typewriting company, and his marriage in Paris with his four children, and then there is his mistress in Rome. He goes to Rome to see her, of course, but he decides to move the mistress to Paris so she can get a job there, and both of them will have a life in the city of lights. But you know a train trip from Paris to Rome is ten to eleven hours so that one can change their mind on such a journey.
Oddly enough, I now remember a train trip I took to Rome from Paris, and my memory is of falling asleep in a compartment with a French grandmother and her grandchild and serving bread and cheese to him for the journey. When I woke up, they were gone but replaced by an Italian grandmother and her grandchild, and they were screaming at each other. She cut up thin slices of salami on bread, and the child refused to eat it. It was almost a fistfight between those two. It was the first time I confronted cultural differences between two cultures. On his trip, M. Delmont didn’t have to confront two sets of grandmas, but he reflected on almost everything else during the trip. Mostly, he has feelings regarding the two women in his life.
Even more potent are his feelings about Paris and Rome. The conflict goes beyond the two human beings and contemplates the nature of life in Rome, where he often has to go there for business. He doesn’t want to live in Rome but seems to enjoy the culture as a visitor or tourist. His girlfriend wants to move to Paris because she feels lonely in Rome and wants more opportunities to move to the French capital. There is not that much drama here, but it is how he tells the tale. His observations on the train and its passengers are like reading Proust when he writes about a party. No details were missed, and reading these passages put me back when I took the same route as M. Delmont. The scents and the sounds expressed in the prose are something that I recognize from my trip. It is rare to share these sensory touches with an author in such a manner.
Michel Butor’s works are not that well-known in the English-speaking world. He is often compared with Alain Robbe-Grillet, but their sensibilities differ. Robbe-Grillet focuses on what he conveys as a cinematic close-up with a camera. Butor takes the whole scene like a giant canvas where one can wander from one thought to another. This is my first entrance into the world of Butor, and I’m intrigued to read more of his works, which include fiction, essays, and travel writing. And Changing Track is very much a work of a travel journal set in the fiction genre. The psychological pull of figuring out what he will do, but also the nature of being middle-aged and facing circumstances where one can’t turn back. Ashbery loved this book, and I’m such a fan of the poet; that is good enough for me. But as I sit here and write, I think of this novel as a pleasure and a serious subject matter. Choices between individuals and the importance of one’s landscape and how we approach or live in such a world. That can be Rome or even on a train.
Fabulousity is his stock in trade, an elegant counterpoint to the sublime Robbe-Grillet.