Michel Butor, French novelist and essayist and one of the leading exponents of the nouveau roman, will open the exhibition, “Une Amitié Transatlantique: Michel Butor and Elinor Miller,” on Thursday, April 27, 5:30 p.m. at New York University’s Fales Collection, located on the third floor of the NYU Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South. Butor, who turns 80 this year, will be interviewed by Tom Bishop, Florence Lacaze Gould Professor of French Literature at NYU and director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture, and by Lois Oppenheim, chair of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montclair State University. The event is free and open to the public; for further information call 212.998.2596.
The exhibition, which will be on display through August 31, 2006, features the correspondence between Butor and Elinor Miller, one of the most prominent American scholars of his work. Butor and Miller corresponded for 30 years, and Miller’s family recently donated the correspondence as well as Miller’s outstanding collection of Butor’s books to the Fales Collection.
Butor’s letters, according to Marvin Taylor, head of the Fales Collection, are “written collages that fold up and move. They are extraordinary.”
Butor is best known for his third novel, La Modification, written in 1957 and titled A Change of Heart in the U.S. La Modification won the Prix Renaudot. His other works include: Intervalle, Explorations, Portrait de l’artiste en jeune singe (“Portrait of the Artist as a Young Monkey”), and Improvisations sur Rimbaud.