During the German advance through Belgium into France in 1940, Captain de Reixach is shot dead by a sniper. Three witnesses, involved with him during his lifetime in different capacities - a distant relative, an orderly and a jockey who had an affair with his wife - remember him and help the reader piece together the realities behind the man and his death.A groundbreaking work, for which Claude Simon devised a prose technique mimicking the mind's fluid thought processes, The Flanders Road is not only a masterpiece of stylistic innovation, but also a haunting portrayal - based on a real-life incident - of the chaos and savagery of war.

This collection of essays celebrates the work of the French Nobel prize-winning novelist Claude Simon. Scholars reconsider the fifty years of Simon's fiction in the light of his large-scale autobiographical novel, 'Le Jardin des Plantes' (1997). From a variety of perspectives - postmodernist, psychoanalytic, aesthetic - chapters reflect on the central paradox of Simon's work: his writing and rewriting of an experience of war so disruptive and traumatic that words can never be adequate to communicate it.

Claude Simon: Fashioning the Past by Writing the Present considers the aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical facets of a temporal paradox in the works of French novelist Claude Simon (1913-2005), and its broader implications for the study of narrative, and for cultural and post-modern theory. This paradox emerges from the problematic representation of the past through an aesthetic rooted in an exclusive valorization of the present. In his 1985 Nobel speech, as well as on other numerous occasions, Simon expressed a fascination with simultaneity through the provocative claim that he never wrote about the past, but attempted to capture only what was happening during the writing process, that is, in the “present of writing,” as he put it. Simon’s seemingly unambiguous claim raises significant issues and contradictions that become extensively apparent when the statement is considered in the light of his fictional works, since these must be construed, for the most part, as explorations of the past. In this study Alina Cherry propose to look at the tensions that arise from this paradox, and examine the present of writing holistically—that is both as a stylistic device and within the thematic context of Simon’s works—in order to assess its capacity for becoming an instrument of ontological and epistemological inquiry that can also intervene powerfully in the decisive philosophical and socio-political debates that have animated the cultural landscape of post-World War II France. Simon’s vivid portrayals of suffering and devastation open new ways of understanding the impact of some of the most traumatic historical events of the twentieth century: the two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. This impact is necessarily connected with a need to tell these events, and to tell them in highly innovative ways, namely by creating a distinctive style that revolutionizes the outworn narrative traditions of a world whose very foundations have been shattered by the chaos of war and effectively undermines various institutions and dominant socio-cultural structures, revealing implicitly and explicitly, a strong ethical vein.

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

Intertwining the memories of youth and old age, this evocative novel by the French Nobel laureate uses the trolley as a symbol of life as it becomes the mode of transportation that takes the child to school every morning and is transformed into a mobile hospital bed for the man entering into old age.

Reputed to be a conservative group, the Nobel Prize committee astonished the world in 1985 by giving its prize to Claude Simon, one of the most adventurous and challenging of modern authors whose writing defies easy classification. This study shows exactly how inventive and challenging he is. Simon’s works run the gamut from first-person narratives to narratives without a stable perspective. His novels deal with minute details of the grand stages of history—world war, for instance—and with the historical dimensions of everyday life. Mária Minich Brewer demonstrates that Simon has reformulated the standard forms of fiction to expose the logic of narrative, a complex and powerful legacy populated with stereotypes too easily accepted as natural. Her book brings into focus the cultural legacies embedded in narrative as well as the narrative dimensions of culture and history. Simon has voiced suspicion of narrative order. He never underestimates, however, either its pervasiveness or its powers. In his novels, he never dismisses narrative order as being “merely” a matter of formal conventions. On the contrary, he reveals narrative representation to be a powerful agent of some of the most violent events to which an individual is subject.

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.

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon. Simon is a complex figure: for all that he writes in a distinctively modern fictional tradition (exemplified by Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet), his novels contain strong elements of visual representation alongside a very different king of free-floating, anti-realist writing.

This lucid and illuminating study traces the development of an extraordinary experimental writer from his earliest work of the 1940's to his most recent fiction. Ms. Loubère assesses Simon's aims and achievements, and parallels his development as a novelist to the development of the modern novel itself, showing how both moved from traditionalist forms and material toward the highly idiosyncratic "New Novel." After discussing his early works, she devotes a chapter each to Le Vent, L'Herbe, La Route des Flandres, Le Palace, Histoire, La Bataille de Pharsale, Les Corps conducteurs, and Triptyque. Step by step, she points out the changes in technique and focus that occur in each succeeding novel as Simon rejects conventional forms and introduces new ones.

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.