Degrees
by Michel Butor
Trans. Richard Howard
Originally published: Simon and Schuster, 1961
Reprint currently available from Dalkey Archive Press, 2005
351 pages / $13.95  Buy from Dalkey Archive

It is painful to report as much, especially here at the outset of this review, one of whose ostensible purposes is to attract readers to a classic of first-generation French postmodernism, a nouveau roman that was for many years unavailable in English and, even when it was, was not widely discussed. Yet it necessary to reveal that this is a novel [1] concerned with writers and writing. Its main character / protagonist / hero / narrator is a writer, and every dramatic action in the book both originates and terminates in “the literary.” The aesthetic, social and moral quandaries all authors face are accorded some reflection in its pages, and, with the turn of each page, the novel grows in self-consciousness, as if such awareness-of-being-aware could accumulate in measurable deposits, like the nacre in a pearl. And make no mistake: objects matter in the world created by this novel. For this novel proposes to be a manuscript, and a rescued one at that; this manuscript’s (re-)assembly in the form (one both ideal and literal) of a book is not just a plot point which the reader is asked to mark, a scope through which the reader is to track and focus the novel’s action. The making of this particular book (that is, the manuscript “within” the novel) is something only we, as disinterested yet absorbed readers, can achieve. We aren’t just reading pages, reading in the sense of digesting them. A page of this book, once read, is much like a page once it has been written upon. It grows in thickness under the influence of our attention, just as it must have swelled with ink and sweat and  the pressure of the author’s hand as it was being composed. Each page thus acquires a distinct texture and profile, and can be stacked, will lay flat, but each page lends its own disarray to the sequence of pages being so collected. Each page will lay less “true” than it did when it was only blank, and the array of pages each reader puts aside (or places behind him/herself) rests disjointed and askew.

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I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
by Mathias Svalina
Mud Luscious Press, 2011
67 pages / $12.00 Buy from Mud Luscious Press
Rating: 8.7

When I received Mathias Svalina’s novella, I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur in the mail, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I tore open the padded manila envelope and found myself staring at a green and orange cover with the words “a novel(la)” printed on it. Ok. Then I did a preliminary flip through of the book and didn’t see a novella at all. The book seemed to be filled with short poems, prose poems and pieces of what some would call flash fiction. Ok. I was hoping the book wasn’t going to be some failed attempt at “experimental fiction.” But, coming from Mud Luscious Press, I wasn’t exactly surprised that this book was, at first impression, well, weird. J.A. Tyler and his Mud Luscious Press have been putting lovely oddities into the world for a few years now, and I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur stayed the Mud Luscious Press course, and did not disappoint.

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