"I woke up in the train, which was still moving. I lifted the curtain and looked out. I had never in my life seen such desolation. Rain was falling on the Thrace plateau, where not a single tree grew, only small thorny bushes and asphodels among its pebbles. Here and there, inside barbed wire enclosures near their sheet metals camps, Turkish soldiers watched the railway cars go by, coming from the West. We were already several hours late. I closed the curtain and went back to sleep.
The next thing I saw was the long stretch of suburbs on the shores of the Marmara, the airfield and the beaches, then the great golden gate with its two cracked towers of marble white, the maritime ramparts through which we slowly snaked our way, the tall houses of gray wood, the irregular squares, which were not level but littered with rubble, the rising streets, the swarming crowds, the minarets like great pencils.
It was hard getting out of the station. The platform was being repaired, and I had to make my way among piles of stones. The weather had cleared a little. As soon as I emerged into the square, I was caught up and deafened by stridency of the city, by the noise of its taxis and red, yellow or green tramways with their grinding switches, and large billboards proclaiming the merits of different banks wherever you looked on the black facades of this Oriental Liverpool.
It was lucky for me there was rain and fog the first time I crossed the floating bridge of Galata, which breathes gently under your feet every time a tugboat goes by. This bridge is in fact both a bridge and a railway station with two levels, with many iron stairways, flanked by loading quays with landing steps, for the Bosphorus, the Princes Islands or Eyup; with ticket windows, waiting rooms, shops, and cafes, congested with a crowd of fishermen dropping their nylon lines, leaning on the railings or crouching on the edges, and with travelers carrying their baskets, or people walking by, dressed in European style, except for their fur caps, but mostly with profoundly foreign faces, with olive skin, wide cheekbones, a slow and uncertain gait.
The coast of Asia was barely visible. Soaked to the skin, worn out because I had been walking for so long, I sat down to drink a glass of tea at a little square green-painted table. In the room, which was decorated only by advertisements in Turkish, other customers were also drinking in silence. Like me, they watched the people walked by, serious in their dark and dull suits, passing between us and the overloaded river buses coming alongside, the small boats in which men were frying freshly-caught fish over a cooker and stuffing half of each fish into a round loaf, other small boats painted and even sometimes sculpted and hung round with old pieces of tire to cushion the bumps, large caiques with sails, long strings of black barges, to the left the big ships that ran to Smyrna and Alexandria, to the right the cranes, the smoke from the trains, the trees of Gulhane Park, and, above the roofs of the Seraglio with its odd bell tower like a French church, the cupola of Saint Irené, then the Sophia looking as though it were floating, as though it were being borne away in a very slow, imperturbable flight by its four enormous buttresses. "
Mavi Boncuk | Butor visited istanbul twice in 1969 and was a guest at a book fair in 1997.
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The Spirit of Mediterranean Places
Michel Butor[1], Trans. by Lydia Davis PDF LINK (excerpt)
This book gathers French writer Michel Butor's essays on his travel in the Mediterranean. Included are pieces on Cordova, Istanbul, Salonica, Delphi, Crete, and northern Italy, as well as an extended essay on Egypt--where, when he was 24, Butor spent a year teaching French in a secondary school. Michel Butor is one of the leading exponents of the avant-garde writing that emerged in France in the 1950s .
The Spirit of Mediterranean Places A collection of dense, dreamy travel essays, first published in France in 1958, by an acclaimed poet, critic, and proponent of the ""new novel."" Butor's travelogues, like his novels, excel in exact descriptions of physical states. Here, landscapes are often reduced to geometric patterns; Cordova is remembered for ""the cleanliness of the sun and the coolness of the precise shadows it cast, triangles or trapezoids changing proportions according to the day and the hour."" Other places whose patterns Butor traces include Istanbul (an ""Oriental Liverpool""), Salonica, Mantua, Ferrara, and Minya in Middle Egypt, where he passed eight months as a French language instructor. Sometimes the descriptions are impossibly gaseous or vague; of Istanbul, Butor claims in a typical French hyperintellectual inflation that ""this city was at the origin of everything, it has left its mark on everything."" Kirkus Review
[1] Michel Butor (b. 14 September 1926) is a French writer. Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Salonika, 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 has 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 now, he has chosen to work in other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books[6] 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.
The next thing I saw was the long stretch of suburbs on the shores of the Marmara, the airfield and the beaches, then the great golden gate with its two cracked towers of marble white, the maritime ramparts through which we slowly snaked our way, the tall houses of gray wood, the irregular squares, which were not level but littered with rubble, the rising streets, the swarming crowds, the minarets like great pencils.
It was hard getting out of the station. The platform was being repaired, and I had to make my way among piles of stones. The weather had cleared a little. As soon as I emerged into the square, I was caught up and deafened by stridency of the city, by the noise of its taxis and red, yellow or green tramways with their grinding switches, and large billboards proclaiming the merits of different banks wherever you looked on the black facades of this Oriental Liverpool.
It was lucky for me there was rain and fog the first time I crossed the floating bridge of Galata, which breathes gently under your feet every time a tugboat goes by. This bridge is in fact both a bridge and a railway station with two levels, with many iron stairways, flanked by loading quays with landing steps, for the Bosphorus, the Princes Islands or Eyup; with ticket windows, waiting rooms, shops, and cafes, congested with a crowd of fishermen dropping their nylon lines, leaning on the railings or crouching on the edges, and with travelers carrying their baskets, or people walking by, dressed in European style, except for their fur caps, but mostly with profoundly foreign faces, with olive skin, wide cheekbones, a slow and uncertain gait.
The coast of Asia was barely visible. Soaked to the skin, worn out because I had been walking for so long, I sat down to drink a glass of tea at a little square green-painted table. In the room, which was decorated only by advertisements in Turkish, other customers were also drinking in silence. Like me, they watched the people walked by, serious in their dark and dull suits, passing between us and the overloaded river buses coming alongside, the small boats in which men were frying freshly-caught fish over a cooker and stuffing half of each fish into a round loaf, other small boats painted and even sometimes sculpted and hung round with old pieces of tire to cushion the bumps, large caiques with sails, long strings of black barges, to the left the big ships that ran to Smyrna and Alexandria, to the right the cranes, the smoke from the trains, the trees of Gulhane Park, and, above the roofs of the Seraglio with its odd bell tower like a French church, the cupola of Saint Irené, then the Sophia looking as though it were floating, as though it were being borne away in a very slow, imperturbable flight by its four enormous buttresses. "
Mavi Boncuk | Butor visited istanbul twice in 1969 and was a guest at a book fair in 1997.
The Spirit of Mediterranean Places
Michel Butor[1], Trans. by Lydia Davis PDF LINK (excerpt)
This book gathers French writer Michel Butor's essays on his travel in the Mediterranean. Included are pieces on Cordova, Istanbul, Salonica, Delphi, Crete, and northern Italy, as well as an extended essay on Egypt--where, when he was 24, Butor spent a year teaching French in a secondary school. Michel Butor is one of the leading exponents of the avant-garde writing that emerged in France in the 1950s .
The Spirit of Mediterranean Places A collection of dense, dreamy travel essays, first published in France in 1958, by an acclaimed poet, critic, and proponent of the ""new novel."" Butor's travelogues, like his novels, excel in exact descriptions of physical states. Here, landscapes are often reduced to geometric patterns; Cordova is remembered for ""the cleanliness of the sun and the coolness of the precise shadows it cast, triangles or trapezoids changing proportions according to the day and the hour."" Other places whose patterns Butor traces include Istanbul (an ""Oriental Liverpool""), Salonica, Mantua, Ferrara, and Minya in Middle Egypt, where he passed eight months as a French language instructor. Sometimes the descriptions are impossibly gaseous or vague; of Istanbul, Butor claims in a typical French hyperintellectual inflation that ""this city was at the origin of everything, it has left its mark on everything."" Kirkus Review
[1] Michel Butor (b. 14 September 1926) is a French writer. Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Salonika, 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 has 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 now, he has chosen to work in other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books[6] 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.