SOURCE: Hoft-March, Eilene. Review of Improvisations sur Michel Butor: l'écriture en transformation, by Michel Butor. French Review 69, no. 6 (May 1996): 1058–59.

In the following review, Hoft-March assesses Improvisations as an autobiographical extrapolation of Butor's desire to test and play with man's mental boundaries.

Much of Butor's writing has been occasioned by cultural encounters with artists, histories, and cultures of another kind, encounters made possible by the deliberate crossing of boundaries. He has frequently demonstrated that writing can and should nudge us to the other side of boundaries that are, foremost but no less formidably, mental rather than real. Improvisations sur Michel Butor might seem less in that bold spirit of transgressing limits were the circumstances of its production not made explicit. For years, bound by professional scruple and tacit academic constraint, Butor never spoke of his own writing in his classrooms at the University of Geneva. Only when colleagues...