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"It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one."
- Michel de Montaigne
(1553 - 1592)
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ZIN Product Number: 10927665
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| | | |  | | | Product Details
 Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 121 pages
Edition: 1st ed
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 1564780899
Release Date: Jan 5, 1995
| |  | | | In Brief
This novel "(first published in French in 1967) is based on 'two levels, dream and reality--in alternating chapters,' according to Leon Roudiez's French Fiction Revisited (1991). The realistic side of the novel is an autobiographical account of the author's post-WW II visit to a German castle in Franconia that houses 'the second largest library in Germany.' . . . {The other sidecomprises} dream-like sequences; a vampire's abduction of a young maiden on the eve of her wedding; her seduction of the narrator; . . . {and} the vampire's violent rage, which results in {the narrator's} banishment and transformation into an ape." (Choice)
| | | | From The Publisher
Like James Joyce's and Dylan Thomas's similar titles, Butor's novel is autobiographical in nature and explores the way a writer develops. Shortly after World War II a young man travels to a castle in Franconia housing the second largest private library in Germany. There he discovers a multitude of stimuli for his imagination: a castle once the site of celebrations and executions, the old library, mineral collections, rooms decorated in mythological themes, and an exiled count who has a passion for highly original games of solitaire. Days are spent in the library steeping himself in the literature of alchemy, whose great theme was transformation. At night, the young man dreams he is in an adventure that begins as a vampire story and ends as a tale from The Thousand and One Nights, in which a young man is transformed into an ape.
Bordering between autobiography and elements of Gothic horror, this "caprice" shows the development as a young man of one of France's most important contemporary novelists during and just after World War II. In brief, this is autobiography as if invented by H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, and Edgar Allan Poe, and then as reinvented by the French New Novelists, with one further layer supplied by Mel Brooks: just what autobiography should read like when recapturing the sense of life in Nazi-dominated Europe where history, fact, illusion, myth, dreams, legends, black magic, and memory become indistinguishable. First published in 1967, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape may well be one of the most captivating works about the growth of a writer's imagination.
"A cunningly inventive novel." (Tribune Books 7-2-95)
"Butor's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape is, without a doubt, a strange brew, but it offers much to the reader who appreciates an author who refuses to color inside the lines." (San Francisco Review of Books Nov/Dec 95)
"Dreams and imagination comprise approximately one half of this book's 123 pages. They serve to bridge time past and its rich cultural history (of which Butor is extremely knowledgeable—and shows it) with time present (the text under discussion), and the present with the future (in which the dreamer becomes the author of many novels, several of them available in English translation)." (Harvard Review 5-95)
"In addition to being one of the great modern writers of place . . . Butor is a formidable displacer; he folds Jules Verne, Bram Stoker, and The Thousand and One Nights together to create a giddy realm of multiplicities." (Word 6-95)
"This excellent translation from the French of Michel Butor's autobiographical novella could not have appeared at a more timely moment. It might easily be placed alongside the recent 'autofictions' of other veteran New Novelists, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, but Butor may be credited with originating the current literary trend of fictionalized autobiography in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ape." (Times Literary Supplement 8-25-95)
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| | | | | | Keywords
Books and reading, Germany, Fiction, Young men, Metamorphosis, Fiction - General, Fiction, Germany, Books and reading, Young men, Dreams, Metamorphosis
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