Michel Butor's explicit re-working of dreams began with Matière de rêves. That has now become the general title, and Second sous-sol is Volume 2. But it is more than a matter of arithmetic. If there are, once again, five dreams with a common formal structure, and even deliberate echoes of the first collection, it is soon apparent that here we are to be plunged much deeper into the stuff of dreams. Where, before, there was an "I" to whom things occurred—adventures, memories, fears, desires—"I" now is simply the name of that which moves through continual, rapid and total change; identity is as far away at the end as at the beginning. Where, in the first series, the private world of family recurred as a reassuringly secure base, it too is now no more than names attached to uncertain presences which flit erratically through the pages...