Claude Simon

When Captain de Reixach is killed by a German sniper, three of his fellow soldiers look back on his life.

The Flanders Road

Tramvay

Triptych (Calderbooks)

By the winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature, a riveting, stylistically audacious modernist epic about the French cavalry's bloody face-off against German Panzer tanks during WWII. On a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army’s panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was among the French forces. As they retreated, he saw his captain shot off his horse by a German sniper. This is the primal scene to which Simon returns repeatedly in his fiction and nowhere so powerfully as in his most famous novel The Flanders Road. Here Simon’s own memories overlap with those of his central character, Georges, whose captain, a distant relative, dies a similar death. Georges reviews the circumstances and sense—or senselessness—of that death, first in the company of a fellow prisoner in a POW camp and then some years later in the course of an ever more erotically charged visit to the captain’s widow, Corinne. As he does, other stories emerge: Corinne’s prewar affair with the jockey Iglésia, who would become the captain’s orderly; the possible suicide of an eighteenth-century ancestor, whose grim portrait loomed large in Georges’s childhood home; Georges’s learned father, whose books are no help against barbarism. The great question throughout, the question that must be urgently asked even as it remains unanswerable, is whether fiction can confront and respond to the trauma of history.

The Nobel Prize-winning writer takes a dive into human consciousness in his latest novel, using his own battle experience during World War II to explore the "fabulous chaos" of war.

The Jardin Des Plantes

A young woman talks to her lover about her dying aunt, recounts memories of her past, and shares her thoughts about life and death

The Grass

Jaddeye Flander

The Georgics

Antoine Montes, a stranger with a mysterious past, arrives at a small French town to claim the vineyard he has inherited, but becomes involved in a difficult lawsuit and an unproductive relationship

The Wind

A failed marriage, the accidental death of a child by drowning, and an incident at a summer resort are the subject matter of these three stories, interwoven and told out of sequence.

Triptych

A Novel

Conducting Bodies

This novel is about war. In fact, it is about two wars, the two world wars. Much of it is autobiographical, with Simon himself being the key character in the World War II story and his father being the key character in the World War I story. The novel consists of 12 chapters, each with a date, either a specific date (i.e. day, month, year) or a more general date (i.e. year or range of years). We actually start off with 1919, i.e. after World War I. Three women and a young boy are travelling around ruined France, looking for something. Simon gives a wonderful picture of France just after World War I, a country in ruins, completely devastated with few facilities and transport networks destroyed. We soon learn that the group consists of a widow, her sisters-in-law and the widow's son. They are looking for the grave of the widow's late husband, killed in the war. The young boy is Simon himself, with his mother and his aunts, who actually did go looking for the grave of Simon's father (this was confirmed by Simon in an interview with Marianne Alphant, a journalist for La Libération). They find the grave from a description they have been given. Simon's father and another French officer are buried in a grave with German soldiers, as they were killed in a fight with the Germans but the French, in retreat, had no time to recover the bodies.

The Acacia

La strada delle Fiandre

This 1987 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Claude Simon is a sardonic look at glasnost Russia, where recent reforms and improvements carry all the conviction of rouge on a corpse. The narrator is one of fifteen international guests who have been invited on a goodwill tour of the new Soviet Union. Whisked from one staged event to another, from Moscow to Central Asia, enduring hours of rigid Soviet hospitality, the guests react with varying degrees of stupefaction and disgust to a society whose recent renovations ill-disguise a bloody and repressive past. The Invitation is a reminder that although the Cold War may be over, the past cannot and should not be forgotten; the Soviets have a new game to play--diplomacy rather than military force--but Simon voices skepticism in our current era of pro-Soviet sentiment. The chief attraction of The Invitation is Simon's celebrated style: long, convoluted sentences register the narrator's impressions, sometimes dragging with fatigue, but always sharpened with sensuous details and spiked with mordant satire. No one is named, but the reader will see through their identities as easily as the narrator sees through the sham of perestroika. This compact masterpiece of political satire concludes with an afterword by Lois Oppenheim, a noted authority on Simon's work.

The Invitation

Histoire

Events from the French Revolution through the twentieth century, including the Spanish Civil War and the defeat of France in 1940, are interwoven to present an ironic view of history and the folly and wastefulness of war.

Roman

Die Trambahn

La Invitación

Fiction. THE PALACE, Claude Simon's seventh novel, has its roots in events in Simon's life, in this case the Spanish Civil War, in which he was a participant and a supporter of the republican governernment. Simon sees most things in life as circular, events that recur, and revolutions are no exception. The Spanish war was a political catastrophe and it is the images of destruction, waste and inefficiency that give this novel its power. Simon describes the bureaucratic accumulation of paper which always manages to soak up all violence and every act of revolt and creates poignant pictures of dead dchildren, disillusioned soldiers and students, the betrayal of Catalonia by the Communists, about which George Orwell has also written (in a work that influenced Simon) and the power struggle that splintered the republican side. This powerful narrative is one of the most important examples of the nouveau roman and revolution, a time of confusion and differing views of reality, is a most suitable backg

Claude Simon

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