This was the first of five books Butor published under this general title, and includes short pieces on Cordoba, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Delphi, Ferrara and Mantua, as well as a much longer piece based on Butor's time working as a teacher in a small town in Egypt. They aren't really "travel pieces" or "essays" in the conventional sense: Butor is trying to find a new way to knit together his subjective impressions of a place with more objective observation and with cultural and historical background material, without allowing any of these separate threads to have more weight than the others. He does this partly by shuffling around the order in which he presents different classes of ideas to us, but he's also relying on some odd grammatical tricks. He uses conjunctions and demonstratives in places where we don't expect them, and instead of the conventional hierarchy of paragraphs, sentences and clauses, he is trying out a new way of writing based on long sentences split up into paragraph-length clauses.

Except that this last bit isn't really new - after a few pages I realised where I'd seen this structure before: it's exactly the way that the preambles of documents like international treaties are written (in French, at least; in English drafters tend to rely on the deadly word "whereas" to start each clause). Possibly just the effect of déformation professionelle in my case, but after the penny dropped it was difficult to look at Butor's "comma, new paragraph" jumps without thinking of contracting states meeting in diplomatic conference...

That silly quibble apart, Butor's prose is seductive, and it's sometimes hard to avoid reading it for its sound rather than its sense. But it is worth trying to do both: he has a lot of interesting things to say about places and how they reflect the different stages in their history, and how important it is to see history in a holistic, continuous and local way, not as a bunch of irreconcilable "periods" invented by historians from elsewhere. Especially in the Egyptian piece, he is concerned about the way the education system tries to impose a Eurocentric view of the past that doesn't at all reflect the experience of the ordinary people living there. It's also telling, in this context, that he chose to follow the Cordoba piece, in which he reminds us how the beauty of the city's Islamic architecture barely managed to survive attempts to Christianise it, with the Istanbul piece, where things are of course precisely the other way round. The Delphi piece is also interesting: Delphi would strike most people as a perfect example of a place which revolves completely around one tradition from one historical moment, but Butor takes the time to dig out traces of at least five previous cults which shaped the Apollo tradition. Obviously we should never take anything for granted. ( )