Braving the deep waters, Patrice wrote to zorn-list: P> But I had the impression that PORTRAIT DE L'ARTISTE EN JEUNE SINGE was P> not really a novel (I almost even remember that Butor gave up on writing P> novels after his first three ones). How would you classify this book? Well, the front cover calls it "A Caprice by Michel Butor", which is probably equivocal enough to be meaningful ;-) ... if I had to invent a genre for it to live in, I guess "imaginary memoir" would suit, if I weren't worried that would put it at some sort of equivalency with Chuck Barris' book (well ...). So it's narrated by a guy named Butor who is invited to spend a summer, in the immediate post-war years, working in the library of a castle in Germany and helping the resident count brush up on his French. Chapters in this narrative alternate with dreams experienced during his stay (or rather, dreams he describes himself as having had ... "rather than claim to remember any dreams I may have had at the castle of H---, remember well enough to be able to note them down after so many years, I prefer to deliberately reconstruct them, dreaming methodically about those long-lost vanished dreams." The dreams are quite well-done, following their own logic but with irruptions of bits of language from the other track used for different ends ... the dreams are markedly of an initiatory character, with explicit alchemical references (e.g. a character whose eyes, in four episode in one chapter, shift from black to green to blue to white; I sense the long arm of C.G. Jung at work here). The daylight scenes are probably equally interpretable as initiatory, but a bit -- a bit -- more naturalistic; they also explicitly quote a fair amount of alchemical literature as Butor browses it in the library. There's a sense, as in Harry Smith's _Heaven and Earth Magic_, that sense could be made of all this, if only there were graph paper in a sufficient number of dimensions. The language is great, managing to recall in the space of a page, here Schulz ("This entire castle was a bubble in time, miraculously spared from the flames, an island in time, with shores, with fortresses built up by the tides, the waves of the present, an island that had provided shelter for all the survivors from another part of the Holy Empire, from another bubble in time which itself had expired under the madness."), there Robbe-Grillet ("... I stopped my reading, i waited, looked out the window, all was calm, the grass, the witch's house, someone was drinking something in the guard's hut, silence, I strolled through the tunnels of forgotten controversies, of terrifying marvels, of heraldry, alchemy, exorcisms, all was calm, I returned to my cell, resumed my slow reading of the _Practica cum Duodecim Clavibus & Appendice, de Magno Lapide Antiquorum Sapientium, cripta & relicta_, printed ..." (etc., this sentence goes on, with interpolated quotes from the texts, for another 2/3 of a page). What fun. -- Jim Flannery newgrange@sfo.com There's no need for us to return to San Francisco at all. -- Michael Moorcock np: Mr. Bungle, _Disco Volante_ nr: Michel Butor, _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape_