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Passing Time
Frenchman Jacques Revel arrives in Bleston (a thinly disguised, reimagined Manchester) to begin work as a shipping clerk. Lost under the spell of a dark, dank, labyrinthine metropolis, he endeavours to solve the puzzle of an attempted murder. We follow his erratic odyssey in diary form as a growing sense of unease envelops him and mysterious fires erupt throughout the city.
Passing Time, originally published in France as 'L'emploi du temps' (1956), is the great, lost Manchester novel, a book of enormous imagination and vitality. Melding Greek myth and Proustian method to formulate a brilliant study of alienation and the nebulousness of memory. A work that attempts to excavate Britain's proto-capitalist past and industrial forebears—interrogating their affect on modernity and the human soul.
'L'Emploi du temps' won the 1957 Fénéon Prize.
Passing Time, originally published in France as 'L'emploi du temps' (1956), is the great, lost Manchester novel, a book of enormous imagination and vitality. Melding Greek myth and Proustian method to formulate a brilliant study of alienation and the nebulousness of memory. A work that attempts to excavate Britain's proto-capitalist past and industrial forebears—interrogating their affect on modernity and the human soul.
'L'Emploi du temps' won the 1957 Fénéon Prize.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1956
7 people are currently reading
509 people want to read
About the author
Michel Butor
317Ìýbooks73ÌýfollowersMichel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-BarÅ“ul, a suburb of Lille. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Thessaloniki, the United States, and Geneva. He has won many literary awards for his work, including the Prix Apollo, the Prix Fénéon; and the Prix Renaudot.
Journalists and critics have associated his novels with the nouveau roman, but Butor himself long resisted that association. The main point of similarity is a very general one, not much beyond that; like exponents of the nouveau roman, he can be described as an experimental writer. His best-known novel, La Modification, for instance, is written entirely in the second person. In his 1967 La critique et l'invention, he famously said that even the most literal quotation is already a kind of parody because of its "trans-contextualization."
For decades, he chose to work in other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books to unclassifiable works like Mobile. Literature, painting and travel are subjects particularly dear to Butor. Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led Roland Barthes to praise him as an epitome of structuralism (exemplified, for instance, by the architectural scheme of Passage de Milan or the calendrical structure of L'emploi du temps) with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than to Robbe-Grillet.
Journalists and critics have associated his novels with the nouveau roman, but Butor himself long resisted that association. The main point of similarity is a very general one, not much beyond that; like exponents of the nouveau roman, he can be described as an experimental writer. His best-known novel, La Modification, for instance, is written entirely in the second person. In his 1967 La critique et l'invention, he famously said that even the most literal quotation is already a kind of parody because of its "trans-contextualization."
For decades, he chose to work in other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books to unclassifiable works like Mobile. Literature, painting and travel are subjects particularly dear to Butor. Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led Roland Barthes to praise him as an epitome of structuralism (exemplified, for instance, by the architectural scheme of Passage de Milan or the calendrical structure of L'emploi du temps) with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than to Robbe-Grillet.
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July 22, 2021
"Any detective story, is constructed on two murders" (I cannot remember the exact words nor the order of his sentences in our dialogue, but the fragments that survive in my mind group themselves into coherent speech) "- any detective story, is constructed on two murdersof which the first, committed by the criminal, is only the occasion of the second, in which he is the victim of the pure, unpunishable murderer, the detective, who kills him not by one of those despicable means he was himself reduced to using, poison, the knife, a silent shot or the twist of a silk stocking, but by the explosion of truth."
Passing Time is Jean Stewart's 1960 translation of Michael Butor's L'Emploi du temps, winner, in the original, of the 1957 Fénéon Prize. Butor himself commented (with justification) in a letter that "Jean Stewart has made a lovely job of the translation—this text must have been a brute to deal with."
The English translation had long been out of print but was wonderfully re-issued in 2021 by Pariah Press.
Butor was an experimental writer, often associated with the nouveau roman, but actually with his own unique style. : "La littérature, c’est l’expérimentation sur le langage". And his Wikipedia page describes his style:
I came to this novel via the wonderful of Cath Annabel whose is the link between Butor, and Passing Time in particular, and the work of the great , who began his UK academic career in Manchester, where Butor had earlier taught.
Passing Time is set in Bleston, probably in 1952 or 1956 (certainly a leap year), a fictionalised version of Manchester (although Manchester exists as a separate city in the novel). And Sebald's poems, as collected and translated by Iain Galbraith in include 'Bleston A Mancunian Cantical', the last stanza of which reads:
V. Perdu dans ces filaments
But the certitude nonetheless
That a human heart
Can be crushed--Eli Eli
The choice between Talmud and Torah
Is hard and there is no relying
On Bleston’s libraries
Where for years now I have sought
With my hands and eyes the misplaced
Books which so they say Mr. Dewey’s
International classification system
With all its numbers still cannot record
A World Bibliography of Bibliographies
On ne doit plus dormir says Pascal
A revision of all books at the core
Of the volcano has been long overdue
In this cave within a cave
No glance back to the future survives
Reading star-signs in winter one must
Cut from pollard willows on snowless fields
Flutes of death for Bleston
There is also a clear, if less explicit, influence on the Max Ferber section of .
Passing Time itself is narrated by a Frenchman, Jacques Revel. It opens with a chapter headed "MAY: October" with the entry:
Thursday, May 1
Suddenly there were a lot of lights.
And then I was in the town; my year’s stay there, more than half of which has now elapsed, began at that moment, while I gradually struggled free of drowsiness, sitting there alone in the corner of the compartment, facing the engine, beside the dark windowpane covered on the outside with raindrops, myriad tiny mirrors each reflecting a quivering particle of the feeble light that drizzled down from the grimy ceiling, while the thick blanket of noise that for hours past, almost unremittingly, had enfolded me began to thin at last, to break up.
Revel arrived in Manchester at the beginning of October, to spend one year working, writing and translating French correspondence, at the small firm of exporters Matthews & Son, where he is one of ten clerks. As the novel opens, on 1 May of the next year, he is exactly 7 months into his stay.
The "calendrical structure" (per Wikipedia) of the novel is that the novel consists of journey entries where he looks back, chronologically, on his stay, so that the MAY: October chapter is written in various entries during May, but tells the story of his first month in Bleston. His aim is to tell the story of the previous 7 months in the 5 that remain to him.
But this timing convention becomes increasingly complex - the JUNE chapter includes some present-day action (JUNE: June) alongside recollection (JUNE: November), and the JULY chapter includes some sections looking back to the beginning of the novel (JULY: May), where Revel questions his own account. As his journal progresses, he also starts to recount time backwards from before the 1 May opening. This working backward and forward is in a race with Revel's leaving date at the end of September, with the result that we never do find out what happened on February 29, although Revel assures us it was a key event.
The time scheme also means that in many cases characters appear (e.g. a fellow Frenchman, Lucien, who plays a key role) without introduction, as Revel has yet to recount how he first met them, or past incidents are referred to that the readers has yet to hear told.
Revel also describes his perambulations, and the bus routes, in Bleston is street-by-street detail, together with a hand-sketched map at the journal's start - the English version here:
Revel's Bleston is a gloomy place, which he describes in wonderfully convoluted sentences, translated beautifully by Stewart, this a (relatively short) example from his initially unsuccessful search for lodgings:
But I had learnt my lesson now; since it had proved so hard to make two expeditions in succession, I would pick out one single address each evening in my paper, and since these vacant rooms were snapped up so quickly I would plan my journey in the restaurant, between courses, so as to rush off as soon as possible after the appearance of the advertisement; and I carried out this programme on countless evenings, after leaving Matthews & Sons, while the nights grew darker and colder and rainier (and even when I was not forestalled, the squalor and dreariness of the places made me feel physically sick); the only result being that, as I prowled over the town's surface like a fly across a curtain, I began to grow familiar with the complex network of its transport system, with the main junctions of the channels through which its drab lymph flowed, like beer thinned down with slop-water, its weary crowd of sleepwalkers, their flesh muddily white or mauve, so that little by little I came to feel that my bad luck was due to some malevolent will and that all these offers were so many lies, and I had to struggle increasingly against the impression that all my efforts were foredoomed to failure, that I was going round and round a blank wall, that the doors were sham doors and the people dummies, the whole thing a hoax.
The tangled sentences, the confusing streets of Bleston, and the looping timelines all link to one of the novel's cornerstones, the story of Theseus and the labyrinth, illustrated on a tapestry, the pride exhibit in the city's museum.
The narrative drive of the novel, a metaphysical detective story, comes when Revel discovers in a bookshop a Penguin Classic, The Bleston Murder, set in the town, one which also causes him to perturb his initially orderly time scheme:
That is why I now feel compelled to interrupt the pattern I had been following for the past month in my narrative, mingling regularly, week by week, notes on current happenings with recollections of last November, a pattern which I had followed ever since that Monday night when I introduced into the middle of pages describing, with scrupulous fidelity, those far-off autumn days, an account of the previous evening, which I had spent at the Baileys' and in the course of which Ann had produced that copy of The Bleston Murder which I had lent her so long ago, after first lending it to James that copy which I had presumed lost because I had forgotten that she had not returned it, and which I had replaced by the copy now lying on the left-hand corner of my table, after hunting endlessly for this out-of-print book in the second-hand shops of Chapel Street, behind the Old Cathedral.
My intractable memory would have yielded only a blurred and patchy picture of that evening at the Baileys' (as I well know from all the inexactitudes and lacunae that I discover when I try to remember it without the help of my notes, and then turn to these for confirmation), if I had not set it down the very next day, Monday, which I should probably not have done if there hadn't been that other reference to J. C. Hamilton's novel the previous evening, Saturday, May 31st, and if I hadn't already betrayed the author's real name, because I should not then have found the book's reappearance so strange and ominous, and I should not have used those particular words.
And when J.C. Hamilton, or rather the real-life author concealed under that pseudonym, is nearly killed in a hit-and-run incident, Revel starts to suspect his friends, himself and even the city of Bleston itself as having arranged the "accident".
Reviews at the time included this from the NY Times (which seems to have a rather narrow view of what a novel should be aiming for):
And this is the Guardian - which had only recently changed its name from the Manchester Guardian and rather took umbrage as Butor's dislike of his time in newspaper's birth city, as relayed via Revel's disdian for his sojourn in Bleston:
But in practice, a work of genius. Highly recommended.
Passing Time is Jean Stewart's 1960 translation of Michael Butor's L'Emploi du temps, winner, in the original, of the 1957 Fénéon Prize. Butor himself commented (with justification) in a letter that "Jean Stewart has made a lovely job of the translation—this text must have been a brute to deal with."
The English translation had long been out of print but was wonderfully re-issued in 2021 by Pariah Press.
Butor was an experimental writer, often associated with the nouveau roman, but actually with his own unique style. : "La littérature, c’est l’expérimentation sur le langage". And his Wikipedia page describes his style:
Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led Roland Barthes to praise him as an epitome of structuralism (exemplified, for instance, by the architectural scheme of Passage de Milan or the calendrical structure of L'emploi du temps) with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than to Robbe-Grillet.
I came to this novel via the wonderful of Cath Annabel whose is the link between Butor, and Passing Time in particular, and the work of the great , who began his UK academic career in Manchester, where Butor had earlier taught.
Passing Time is set in Bleston, probably in 1952 or 1956 (certainly a leap year), a fictionalised version of Manchester (although Manchester exists as a separate city in the novel). And Sebald's poems, as collected and translated by Iain Galbraith in include 'Bleston A Mancunian Cantical', the last stanza of which reads:
V. Perdu dans ces filaments
But the certitude nonetheless
That a human heart
Can be crushed--Eli Eli
The choice between Talmud and Torah
Is hard and there is no relying
On Bleston’s libraries
Where for years now I have sought
With my hands and eyes the misplaced
Books which so they say Mr. Dewey’s
International classification system
With all its numbers still cannot record
A World Bibliography of Bibliographies
On ne doit plus dormir says Pascal
A revision of all books at the core
Of the volcano has been long overdue
In this cave within a cave
No glance back to the future survives
Reading star-signs in winter one must
Cut from pollard willows on snowless fields
Flutes of death for Bleston
There is also a clear, if less explicit, influence on the Max Ferber section of .
Passing Time itself is narrated by a Frenchman, Jacques Revel. It opens with a chapter headed "MAY: October" with the entry:
Thursday, May 1
Suddenly there were a lot of lights.
And then I was in the town; my year’s stay there, more than half of which has now elapsed, began at that moment, while I gradually struggled free of drowsiness, sitting there alone in the corner of the compartment, facing the engine, beside the dark windowpane covered on the outside with raindrops, myriad tiny mirrors each reflecting a quivering particle of the feeble light that drizzled down from the grimy ceiling, while the thick blanket of noise that for hours past, almost unremittingly, had enfolded me began to thin at last, to break up.
Revel arrived in Manchester at the beginning of October, to spend one year working, writing and translating French correspondence, at the small firm of exporters Matthews & Son, where he is one of ten clerks. As the novel opens, on 1 May of the next year, he is exactly 7 months into his stay.
The "calendrical structure" (per Wikipedia) of the novel is that the novel consists of journey entries where he looks back, chronologically, on his stay, so that the MAY: October chapter is written in various entries during May, but tells the story of his first month in Bleston. His aim is to tell the story of the previous 7 months in the 5 that remain to him.
But this timing convention becomes increasingly complex - the JUNE chapter includes some present-day action (JUNE: June) alongside recollection (JUNE: November), and the JULY chapter includes some sections looking back to the beginning of the novel (JULY: May), where Revel questions his own account. As his journal progresses, he also starts to recount time backwards from before the 1 May opening. This working backward and forward is in a race with Revel's leaving date at the end of September, with the result that we never do find out what happened on February 29, although Revel assures us it was a key event.
The time scheme also means that in many cases characters appear (e.g. a fellow Frenchman, Lucien, who plays a key role) without introduction, as Revel has yet to recount how he first met them, or past incidents are referred to that the readers has yet to hear told.
Revel also describes his perambulations, and the bus routes, in Bleston is street-by-street detail, together with a hand-sketched map at the journal's start - the English version here:
Revel's Bleston is a gloomy place, which he describes in wonderfully convoluted sentences, translated beautifully by Stewart, this a (relatively short) example from his initially unsuccessful search for lodgings:
But I had learnt my lesson now; since it had proved so hard to make two expeditions in succession, I would pick out one single address each evening in my paper, and since these vacant rooms were snapped up so quickly I would plan my journey in the restaurant, between courses, so as to rush off as soon as possible after the appearance of the advertisement; and I carried out this programme on countless evenings, after leaving Matthews & Sons, while the nights grew darker and colder and rainier (and even when I was not forestalled, the squalor and dreariness of the places made me feel physically sick); the only result being that, as I prowled over the town's surface like a fly across a curtain, I began to grow familiar with the complex network of its transport system, with the main junctions of the channels through which its drab lymph flowed, like beer thinned down with slop-water, its weary crowd of sleepwalkers, their flesh muddily white or mauve, so that little by little I came to feel that my bad luck was due to some malevolent will and that all these offers were so many lies, and I had to struggle increasingly against the impression that all my efforts were foredoomed to failure, that I was going round and round a blank wall, that the doors were sham doors and the people dummies, the whole thing a hoax.
The tangled sentences, the confusing streets of Bleston, and the looping timelines all link to one of the novel's cornerstones, the story of Theseus and the labyrinth, illustrated on a tapestry, the pride exhibit in the city's museum.
The narrative drive of the novel, a metaphysical detective story, comes when Revel discovers in a bookshop a Penguin Classic, The Bleston Murder, set in the town, one which also causes him to perturb his initially orderly time scheme:
That is why I now feel compelled to interrupt the pattern I had been following for the past month in my narrative, mingling regularly, week by week, notes on current happenings with recollections of last November, a pattern which I had followed ever since that Monday night when I introduced into the middle of pages describing, with scrupulous fidelity, those far-off autumn days, an account of the previous evening, which I had spent at the Baileys' and in the course of which Ann had produced that copy of The Bleston Murder which I had lent her so long ago, after first lending it to James that copy which I had presumed lost because I had forgotten that she had not returned it, and which I had replaced by the copy now lying on the left-hand corner of my table, after hunting endlessly for this out-of-print book in the second-hand shops of Chapel Street, behind the Old Cathedral.
My intractable memory would have yielded only a blurred and patchy picture of that evening at the Baileys' (as I well know from all the inexactitudes and lacunae that I discover when I try to remember it without the help of my notes, and then turn to these for confirmation), if I had not set it down the very next day, Monday, which I should probably not have done if there hadn't been that other reference to J. C. Hamilton's novel the previous evening, Saturday, May 31st, and if I hadn't already betrayed the author's real name, because I should not then have found the book's reappearance so strange and ominous, and I should not have used those particular words.
And when J.C. Hamilton, or rather the real-life author concealed under that pseudonym, is nearly killed in a hit-and-run incident, Revel starts to suspect his friends, himself and even the city of Bleston itself as having arranged the "accident".
Reviews at the time included this from the NY Times (which seems to have a rather narrow view of what a novel should be aiming for):
Mr. Butor writes well, and with so thorough an awareness of what he wants to achieve that criticism is pre-empted... He is so disinclined to dramatize that I would suspect his principal gifts are those of a lyrical philosophical poet rather than a novelist—a sort of urban Wordsworth who has lost faith in tranquil recollection.
And this is the Guardian - which had only recently changed its name from the Manchester Guardian and rather took umbrage as Butor's dislike of his time in newspaper's birth city, as relayed via Revel's disdian for his sojourn in Bleston:
Judging by this novel the experience has marked him for life, for Passing Time is not so much a hymn, as a whole oratorio of hate. The mood suggests Kafka at his most paranoid; the method harks back to Virginia Woolf but here the stream-of-consciousness has become a turbid flood, the dark Irwell, mazy as the Ganges delta.
But in practice, a work of genius. Highly recommended.
November 14, 2016
One of the first full books I read in French. Butor is a true artist in how he manipulates the French language and uses word play. I would highly recommend this book for people with intermediate level in French and who want to get a feeling for French literature in the 20th century post-Céline.
August 14, 2008
it took me two (2) tries to read this piece, probably because it was boring as shit. i know the point of the book isn't to give you some thrills, but if you are interested in tight descriptions of lamps and walls, just look at the ones in the room in which you are reading - unless you are one of those people who has a lunch hour, then just concentrate on composing your mc's about the barista chick in the flowery yellow dress and her cockblocking coworker.
May 22, 2024
Almost a decade ago, Michel Butor came across my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ and I added his La modification to me to-read shelf; it proceeded to sit there unconsidered until a couple months ago, after I read Mathias Enard's Zone, from which Enard drew inspiration of its main conceit (a train ride from Paris to Rome in which the narrator's anxious and roving mind considers a major impending decision). I found that novel of Butor's to be fascinating in its total internality. In Passing Time he returns to that inwardness, and also turns his focus on memory and the act of recording it.
The frame of the novel is a man's yearlong stay in Bleston, a British town, and the apparently mystery which he becomes embroiled in. Is the noir narrative one that is real, or is it merely a story constructed out of random signs, which bare significance only via the process of the narrator's recording and creation? Blending myth, memory, and the mostly ordinary events in the town, experienced through the lens of foreignness and dislocation, Butor managers to create a sense of existential dread and propulsive suspense, interleaved with a meditation on how memories accrue significance as we are assaulted by future events and by reminiscence on prior ones.
In our lives we are often subject to various types of suspense, whether anticipation of something looked-forward-to, or dread of something unknown. And we often create from these feelings of suspense stories which both incorporate events gone-by (whether already loaded with meaning, or which become laden with meaning as we careen toward the thing-unknown), and imagine potential series of future events. Through the process of returning to previous events via a diary, and working toward the present, the narrator becomes more and more convinced of a conspiracy which has underlain the duration of his stay in Bleston. Later on, he reviews his earlier notes, and accrues yet more recent events, and on revisitation he finds yet new significances. Paired with this examination of his own memories, the organizing image of the Labyrinth, particularly Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth. To Butor our experience of memories seem a winding series of insignificant time when viewed with disiniterest, but on closer inspection we sense that we can see around the corners of time to see significances and conspiracies lurching around the corners which yet await us.
The frame of the novel is a man's yearlong stay in Bleston, a British town, and the apparently mystery which he becomes embroiled in. Is the noir narrative one that is real, or is it merely a story constructed out of random signs, which bare significance only via the process of the narrator's recording and creation? Blending myth, memory, and the mostly ordinary events in the town, experienced through the lens of foreignness and dislocation, Butor managers to create a sense of existential dread and propulsive suspense, interleaved with a meditation on how memories accrue significance as we are assaulted by future events and by reminiscence on prior ones.
In our lives we are often subject to various types of suspense, whether anticipation of something looked-forward-to, or dread of something unknown. And we often create from these feelings of suspense stories which both incorporate events gone-by (whether already loaded with meaning, or which become laden with meaning as we careen toward the thing-unknown), and imagine potential series of future events. Through the process of returning to previous events via a diary, and working toward the present, the narrator becomes more and more convinced of a conspiracy which has underlain the duration of his stay in Bleston. Later on, he reviews his earlier notes, and accrues yet more recent events, and on revisitation he finds yet new significances. Paired with this examination of his own memories, the organizing image of the Labyrinth, particularly Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth. To Butor our experience of memories seem a winding series of insignificant time when viewed with disiniterest, but on closer inspection we sense that we can see around the corners of time to see significances and conspiracies lurching around the corners which yet await us.
This is where my real research begins; for I will not rest content with this vague abridgement, I will not let myself be cheated of that past which, I well know, is not an empty past, since I can assess the distance that divides me from the man I was when I arrived, not only the extent to which I have been bogged down and bewildered and blinded but also the gains I have made in some spheres, my progress in the knowledge of this town and its inhabitants, of its horror and its moments of beauty; for I must regain control of all those events which I feel swarming within me, falling into shape despite the mist that threatens to obliterate them, I must summon them before me one by one in their right order, so as to rescue them before they have completely foundered in that great morass of slimy dust, I must rescue my own territories foot by foot from the encroaching weeds that disfigure them, from the scummy waters that are rotting them and preventing them from producing anything but this brittle, sooty vegetation.
August 2, 2011
Ce roman m'a hanté depuis 25 ans. Il décrit une année dans la vie d'un jeune français, Jacques Revel, passée dans une morne ville du nord-ouest de l'Angleterre pendant les années cinquantes. L'histoire racontée dans le journal où Jacques essaie de comprendre et de vaincre la ville de Bleston devient de plus en plus mystérieuse de mois en mois et l'on peut douter que Bleston a rendu Jacques, peu à peu et en quelque sorte fou. Au début Jacques mène une vie désespérante - comprenant peu l'accent des habitants et dépourvu d'amis - il n' a qu'un collègue sympathique, James, qui l'invite diner chez sa mère de temps en temps. Plus tard il recontre deux jeunes et belles femmes anglaises, et un noir, Horace Buck, qui a peut-être quelque chose à voir avec plusieurs incendies qui ménacent la ville . Mes surtout Jacques découvre un roman policier, "le meurtre de Bleston", lequel, à cause du titre ambigu, devient très important pour lui. Plus tard il lui semble que cette livre décrit des événements réels, événements peut-être intimement liés avec James et sa mère.
C'est vraiment dommage que ce roman reste pratiquement inconnu en Angleterre, parce qu'il mérite d'être traduit. On en pourrait tirer un film merveilleux - chaque fois que je pense à "L'emploi du Temps" je revois la pluie et l'atmosphère charbonneux de mon enfance dans une ville que je semble connaître et haïr autant que Jacques.
This novel has haunted me for 25 years. It describes a year in the life of a young Frenchman, Jacques Revel, passed in a dismal town in the North-West of England during the 1950s. The story told in the diary where Jacques tries to understand and conquer the town of Bleston becomes more and more mysterious month by month, and one can believe that Bleston has, little by little, somehow or other made him go mad. In the beginning Jacques leads a miserable life - scarcely understanding the local accent, and deprived of friends - he has only one sympathetic colleague - who invites him to dinner at his mother's from time to time. Later he meets two young and beautiful English girls, and a mysterious black man , Horace Buck, who perhaps has something to do with several fires that threaten the town. But above all Jacques discovers a whodunnit "The murder of Bleston", which, because of its ambiguous title becomes very important to him. Later it seems that this book describes real events, events perhaps intimately connected with James and his mother.
It is a great shame that this novel remains practically unknown in England because it would be worth translating. It would make a marvellous film - each time I think of "L'emploi du Temps" I see again the rain and coaly atmosphere of my childhood in a town that I seem to know and hate as much as Jacques.
C'est vraiment dommage que ce roman reste pratiquement inconnu en Angleterre, parce qu'il mérite d'être traduit. On en pourrait tirer un film merveilleux - chaque fois que je pense à "L'emploi du Temps" je revois la pluie et l'atmosphère charbonneux de mon enfance dans une ville que je semble connaître et haïr autant que Jacques.
This novel has haunted me for 25 years. It describes a year in the life of a young Frenchman, Jacques Revel, passed in a dismal town in the North-West of England during the 1950s. The story told in the diary where Jacques tries to understand and conquer the town of Bleston becomes more and more mysterious month by month, and one can believe that Bleston has, little by little, somehow or other made him go mad. In the beginning Jacques leads a miserable life - scarcely understanding the local accent, and deprived of friends - he has only one sympathetic colleague - who invites him to dinner at his mother's from time to time. Later he meets two young and beautiful English girls, and a mysterious black man , Horace Buck, who perhaps has something to do with several fires that threaten the town. But above all Jacques discovers a whodunnit "The murder of Bleston", which, because of its ambiguous title becomes very important to him. Later it seems that this book describes real events, events perhaps intimately connected with James and his mother.
It is a great shame that this novel remains practically unknown in England because it would be worth translating. It would make a marvellous film - each time I think of "L'emploi du Temps" I see again the rain and coaly atmosphere of my childhood in a town that I seem to know and hate as much as Jacques.
August 17, 2016
Une oeuvre littéraire déguisée en roman policier, écrite comme une oeuvre musicale en contrepoint. Michel Butor est, stylistiquement, un des grands écrivains français contemporains.
February 7, 2020
Much interesting to study!
Minus one star for the blatant racism... I know it was written in the fifties but that doesn't mean I enjoy reading that kind of bullshit 🙄
Minus one star for the blatant racism... I know it was written in the fifties but that doesn't mean I enjoy reading that kind of bullshit 🙄
March 2, 2022
This book was unfortunately sort-of set up to fail. I had been walking in a local bookstore and found this strange, little book on a shelf, where there was no blurb, only a title on its spine, and the date of original publication: 1951.
Obviously, that’s a mystery unto itself, and with a quick google I then found out it had recently been reprinted, and was also argued to be a lost Mancunian classic. So - that’s why I bought it, and then read it, a curiosity to see this recently revived book. Which� isn’t the BEST reason to read a novel, ever.
Because it just wasn’t for me. It’s themes, story, /everything/ just WAS NOT for me. The main character is genuinely pathetic, more so as his desperate hatred of Bleston is undercut, constantly, by the fact that HE WILL LEAVE IN A YEAR. Like - dude - chill out. You’re LEAVING in a year, you’re not trapped, just do your work then go back home. Jesus.
But, I can appreciate its technical qualities, and the genius that he had in writing them. The non-linear narrative, twist of characters appearing without introduction, and the increasing confusion of the prose itself so that you end up as lost as our main character, Jacques, is? It’s brilliantly done, and I will remember it for a long time.
Obviously, that’s a mystery unto itself, and with a quick google I then found out it had recently been reprinted, and was also argued to be a lost Mancunian classic. So - that’s why I bought it, and then read it, a curiosity to see this recently revived book. Which� isn’t the BEST reason to read a novel, ever.
Because it just wasn’t for me. It’s themes, story, /everything/ just WAS NOT for me. The main character is genuinely pathetic, more so as his desperate hatred of Bleston is undercut, constantly, by the fact that HE WILL LEAVE IN A YEAR. Like - dude - chill out. You’re LEAVING in a year, you’re not trapped, just do your work then go back home. Jesus.
But, I can appreciate its technical qualities, and the genius that he had in writing them. The non-linear narrative, twist of characters appearing without introduction, and the increasing confusion of the prose itself so that you end up as lost as our main character, Jacques, is? It’s brilliantly done, and I will remember it for a long time.
August 15, 2024
Video review
May 2, 2019
Pour lecteurs avertis. Un pseudo-polar, où Butor s'amuse à détourner les conventions du genre, à contrarier l'attente du lecteur, lui suggérant des pistes qui ne mènent nulle part, pour mieux le perdre dans les méandres d'une prose qui est la raison d'être de ce roman, avec ses phrases proustiennes, interminables, qui tentent en vain de ressaisir, de présentifier tous les événements vécus par le narrateur. Efforts désespérés de réappropriation de la mémoire, lutte acharnée contre l'oubli, contre la perte de soi. La narrateur a de sérieux problèmes d'individuation (s'adressant à la ville même de Bleston personnifiée : « il faut que je retourne contempler ce prestigieux hiéroglyphe de verre devant lequel en moi tu t’interroges »), de contact avec la réalité, lui qui ne peut l'appréhender qu'à travers ses représentations : carte de la ville de Bleston, polar intitulé Le Meurtre de Bleston lui servant de guide, vitraux de l'Ancienne Cathédrale, allégories de la Nouvelle Cathédrale, tapisseries Harrey du musée, collection d'animaux et dioramas de l'Université de Bleston, documentaires du Théâtre des Nouvelles, miroirs chez les Burton et chez les Bailey où se reflètent les personnages. Mais le vecteur principal de cet perte du réel, c'est évidemment � et paradoxalement � son journal, qu'il ne cesse d'écrire et de relire obsessivement. S'il est vrai qu'il n'y a pas de meurtre, pas d'enquête, il y a par contre un protagoniste en quête du réel. Or, que raconte une intrigue policière, sinon la quête de faits réels, au-delà des pièges des apparences ?
July 10, 2022
A man keeps a diary in which he connects together a number of cultural texts that represent or allude to the town in which he is living—a map, a work of detective fiction, a stained glass window in a cathedral, statues and sculptures in another cathedral—and employs the allegorical narrative these connections produce to interpret his experiences in the town.
Acquired Aug 22, 2006
The Book Addict, London, Ontario
Acquired Aug 22, 2006
The Book Addict, London, Ontario
February 2, 2009
Did this for my translation MA. Not easy to translate, in case you're wondering: you just keep on digging through the layers of meaning and allusion but there's no bottom to it. If you do think you're getting somewhere, there's the epitome of spanner in the works: February 29th. Might sound like hard work, but rewards any patience and thought you're willing to offer.
June 28, 2022
Where to start with this incredible novel? A few years ago I started tinkering with an idea for a series of books called the Thursday Night League about a bunch of resolutely second division crime writers based in Manchester of the 1930s who solve mysteries. Partly this was because the majority of the so called Golden Age of crime fiction is very, very southern and middle class and rarely wanders to the north unless it’s either wildly bucolic or as a contrast to a rural retreat nearby. I spent a good deal of time trying to see if there was any precedent for crime fiction from round these parts (I’m just over the border at the end of West Yorkshire) and struggled to find any. Obviously I was not aware of The Bleston Murder by J C Hamilton
Of course that book doesn’t exist, except as a fictional conceit in this book. In many ways it’s the infernal engine that propels our narrator into his madness, and as such is the second book I’ve read lately with heavy allusions to Theseus and the labyrinth and a narrator going slowly mad trying to fathom out a work of probable fiction that completely overwhelms him. The plot of the book is simple: young Frenchman spends a year in very-clearly-but-not-quite-Manchester, is bitterly lonely, hates the city, gets obsessed with a crime novel and starts to slowly lose himself trying to see that novel and the author and the friends he does make as somehow connected. The narrator obsessively looks for connections where there are none, whilst also worrying whether a series of mysterious fires might also be connected
The closest precedent in crime fiction terms is the extraordinary sequence in Kitchin’s Death of My Aunt, where the narrator suspects his uncle is the murderer and is now shut up in a house with them and slowly begins to unravel. Butor is simply using crime fiction as the centre for him to weave his dizzying web, but he’s not alone in gravitating to the genre for this as part of the appeal of crime fiction for many (especially me), is that it is a palimpsest where we can overlay obsessions of the time over the simple narrative structure. Again, you wonder if Paul Auster was aware of this novel when writing the New York Trilogy, another sort of crime fiction with a lot of psychogeographical meandering around city spaces
The real genius of the book - and it is a masterpiece- is how Butor writes. He writes these dense paragraphs of prose which are somehow both crystal clear in meaning but also full of repetition and obsessive terminology. The rhythm is a sort of growing crescendo of unease, and seeing that Butor deliberately structured it like music makes a lot of sense because themes and moments repeat maddeningly in paragraphs, as Revel slowly gets lost within his thoughts (it’s interesting that when he is most lucid he is nameless but when at his most confused he uses his name, like it’s a sort of beacon to find his way with). Again, there are similarities with House of Leaves in how the prose mirrors our narrator’s descent into madness, long and baroque and beautiful, but suddenly repetitive and disturbing. The constant repetitions make it feel incredibly oppressive, like something (fires maybe?) is about to break out at any moment
Living near Manchester of the 21st century (and first visiting there in 1998), it’s a wildly different place to Bleston, in the same way that a 1950s Hebden Bridge is different to how it is now. What was full of urban decay and misery and poverty is now almost absurdly cosmopolitan (to the point of losing some of the flavour of the place, although there are always a maze of back roads to lose yourself down as our narrator knows to his cost). So the Manchester being written here does not resonate with me, but the narrator’s disgust with his temporary home (autobiographical by all accounts) does very much feel familiar. I had a horrible time at university, in a town I didn’t like and horribly disconnected from everyone else there for a good two years. I obsessively misunderstood social cues and adopted crushes on unobtainable girls as a way to get me out of my misery but instead pulled me further into depression because i didn’t really have the mental capacity to cope with anything. I wandered the town obsessively, especially at night, torturing myself with seeing how others had a connection I so sorely felt an absence of. So I felt every word of this. I felt every angry, confused, hurt, horribly lost word. It’s an extraordinary book on so many levels and one that will probably forever haunt me
Of course that book doesn’t exist, except as a fictional conceit in this book. In many ways it’s the infernal engine that propels our narrator into his madness, and as such is the second book I’ve read lately with heavy allusions to Theseus and the labyrinth and a narrator going slowly mad trying to fathom out a work of probable fiction that completely overwhelms him. The plot of the book is simple: young Frenchman spends a year in very-clearly-but-not-quite-Manchester, is bitterly lonely, hates the city, gets obsessed with a crime novel and starts to slowly lose himself trying to see that novel and the author and the friends he does make as somehow connected. The narrator obsessively looks for connections where there are none, whilst also worrying whether a series of mysterious fires might also be connected
The closest precedent in crime fiction terms is the extraordinary sequence in Kitchin’s Death of My Aunt, where the narrator suspects his uncle is the murderer and is now shut up in a house with them and slowly begins to unravel. Butor is simply using crime fiction as the centre for him to weave his dizzying web, but he’s not alone in gravitating to the genre for this as part of the appeal of crime fiction for many (especially me), is that it is a palimpsest where we can overlay obsessions of the time over the simple narrative structure. Again, you wonder if Paul Auster was aware of this novel when writing the New York Trilogy, another sort of crime fiction with a lot of psychogeographical meandering around city spaces
The real genius of the book - and it is a masterpiece- is how Butor writes. He writes these dense paragraphs of prose which are somehow both crystal clear in meaning but also full of repetition and obsessive terminology. The rhythm is a sort of growing crescendo of unease, and seeing that Butor deliberately structured it like music makes a lot of sense because themes and moments repeat maddeningly in paragraphs, as Revel slowly gets lost within his thoughts (it’s interesting that when he is most lucid he is nameless but when at his most confused he uses his name, like it’s a sort of beacon to find his way with). Again, there are similarities with House of Leaves in how the prose mirrors our narrator’s descent into madness, long and baroque and beautiful, but suddenly repetitive and disturbing. The constant repetitions make it feel incredibly oppressive, like something (fires maybe?) is about to break out at any moment
Living near Manchester of the 21st century (and first visiting there in 1998), it’s a wildly different place to Bleston, in the same way that a 1950s Hebden Bridge is different to how it is now. What was full of urban decay and misery and poverty is now almost absurdly cosmopolitan (to the point of losing some of the flavour of the place, although there are always a maze of back roads to lose yourself down as our narrator knows to his cost). So the Manchester being written here does not resonate with me, but the narrator’s disgust with his temporary home (autobiographical by all accounts) does very much feel familiar. I had a horrible time at university, in a town I didn’t like and horribly disconnected from everyone else there for a good two years. I obsessively misunderstood social cues and adopted crushes on unobtainable girls as a way to get me out of my misery but instead pulled me further into depression because i didn’t really have the mental capacity to cope with anything. I wandered the town obsessively, especially at night, torturing myself with seeing how others had a connection I so sorely felt an absence of. So I felt every word of this. I felt every angry, confused, hurt, horribly lost word. It’s an extraordinary book on so many levels and one that will probably forever haunt me
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 17, 2024
Michel Butor was one of the practitioners of the French Nouveau Roman. His novel Passing Time is set in a thinly-disguised version of Manchester called Bleston and concerns the experiences of a Frenchman called Jacques Revel, who has gone there to work for a year as a shipping clerk.
Butor himself spent the years 1951-53 teaching in Manchester, so this is clearly an autobiographical work. One therefore wonders whether the first syllable of grimy, rainy Bleston is derived from the French verb "blesser" - to hurt, to wound. For, it is quite clear that Bleston is the true antagonist of this work.
Passing Time is also a kind of detective story, involving a possible attempted murder, that of the novelist George Burton, who is injured in a hit-and-run accident. Apart from Bleston itself, there is another physical entity that dominates Passing Time, and that is the book, The Bleston Murder, which crops up time and again throughout the narrative.
Passing Time is also a love story, albeit one that fails to develop for the protagonist as a result of his dithering between two women - Rose and Ann. Eventually, both women are snapped up by two rivals.
From a mythological perspective, Ann has the attributes of an Ariadne, guiding the narrator through the labyrinthine streets of Bleston - she even sells him a map to aid him in his peregrinations through the twelve districts.
Butor himself spent the years 1951-53 teaching in Manchester, so this is clearly an autobiographical work. One therefore wonders whether the first syllable of grimy, rainy Bleston is derived from the French verb "blesser" - to hurt, to wound. For, it is quite clear that Bleston is the true antagonist of this work.
Passing Time is also a kind of detective story, involving a possible attempted murder, that of the novelist George Burton, who is injured in a hit-and-run accident. Apart from Bleston itself, there is another physical entity that dominates Passing Time, and that is the book, The Bleston Murder, which crops up time and again throughout the narrative.
Passing Time is also a love story, albeit one that fails to develop for the protagonist as a result of his dithering between two women - Rose and Ann. Eventually, both women are snapped up by two rivals.
From a mythological perspective, Ann has the attributes of an Ariadne, guiding the narrator through the labyrinthine streets of Bleston - she even sells him a map to aid him in his peregrinations through the twelve districts.
June 14, 2022
entre 2,5 et 3. J'ai attendu que quelque chose se passe, me surprenne, pour comprendre pourquoi ce roman avait une telle renommée. Une déception. Mais j'en attendais peut-être quelque chose, dû au fait qu'il était très vanté dans certains livres que j'ai lus à l'université.
July 24, 2022
Impressions mitigées. Si la narration et ses expérimentations sur le temps et la mémoire sont stimulantes, et certains phrasés particulièrement soignés, la lecture de l'œuvre n'en reste pas moins longue et fastidieuse.
February 5, 2023
Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ keeps crashing before I can post my review—simply exquisite. A masterclass in use of unreliable narrator, disjointed timeline, and geographical locale as a major character. At the same time, deeply poignant. Nice to see it back in print: thank you, Pariah Press.
November 7, 2021
Labyrinthe du temps qui passe entre les pierres d’une ville étouffante, le récit est ardu à suivre étant donné sa chronologie éclatée.
December 28, 2022
Sur une suggestion de Pascal Cohen, j'ai relu l'emploi du temps de Michel Butor. Je ne pensais pas y découvrir autant de détails ignorés ou simplement entraperçus, lors de ma première lecture, il y a près de 30 ans. C'est un livre déroutant : un labyrinthe urbain dont la sortie - lieu, comme heure - est connue dès les premières pages, un roman policier sans aucune des deux victimes qu'il annonce pourtant comme l'ingrédient constitutif de tout bon policier, un " emploi du temps " totalement restructuré et impossible à reconstituer, des bribes d'évocations mythologiques et bibliques, une hésitation sentimentale à l'issue évidente, une ville au plan impossible à reconstituer malgré les nombreuses précisions, etc.
C'est évidemment tout cela et beaucoup plus à la fois et je ne peux que conseiller de (re)lire l'un des tous premiers nouveaux romans.
C'est évidemment tout cela et beaucoup plus à la fois et je ne peux que conseiller de (re)lire l'un des tous premiers nouveaux romans.
March 6, 2008
I often look for 'new' writers (Butor isn't exactly new anymore) who might be making breakthroughs in style & content. I thought Butor might've been one of them. So I read this. I just found it dull. It's possible that whatever might've been purported as 'new' in his style might've been a total deliberate absence of drama, excitement, whatever. Maybe there's a fascinating philosophy behind it. But I just found it dull. Oh well. I'd probably read something else by him if I were ever to find anything else in translation.
May 4, 2014
Ah, leurs larmes, que je les enviais de pouvoir les répandre ainsi! Les miennes, toutes chargées de suie, de rouille et d'acide, j'étais obligé de les retenir.
Rose, comme j'aurais voulu ne pas la regarder, comme elle semblait étrangère à cette ville soudain sauvée!
Je ne l'ai pas vraiment aimée, je n'ai pas su vraiment l'aimer, quel droit aurai-je donc sur elle? Il n'y a que cette souffrance...
Rose, comme j'aurais voulu ne pas la regarder, comme elle semblait étrangère à cette ville soudain sauvée!
Je ne l'ai pas vraiment aimée, je n'ai pas su vraiment l'aimer, quel droit aurai-je donc sur elle? Il n'y a que cette souffrance...
February 5, 2014
Far exceeding nouveau roman genre, by which the novel is often categorized, it resembles somehow Memento (the movie), but in diary form and with time going both backward and forward. Interesting formal concept, autotematism, a bit of existentialism and idea of ever fading memory, directly opposed to Proust, but difficult and boring to read tho.
October 12, 2015
L'emploi du temps un nouveau-roman qui se passe dans la ville anglaise de Bleston. L'intrigue tourne en rond. Les personnages ressemble a des rats de laboratoire pris dans un labyrinthe. Ce n'est pas une lecture qui fait plaisir.
De toute facon le mouvement nouveau-roman se fait jaser. Lisez-le afin de savoir de quoi on parle.
De toute facon le mouvement nouveau-roman se fait jaser. Lisez-le afin de savoir de quoi on parle.
January 27, 2019
gorgeous book that pulls you into the mystery of life in a new place, and the limitations of time and memory.
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