a remnant of French cavalry waiting in an Alsatian farmhouse to be overrun by the Germans. It is not exactly a novel but a collage of impressions as if looking at a scenery with wide tele-photo lens and focusing on every tiny detail. At the end something of a story emerges through this meticulous painting with words.

the author's daring to try a form so outrageous.

the elaborate descriptions and too many metaphors for every single thing. It distracts the reader. I found myself losing concentration, which almost never happens when I read.

find out more about those people giving out the Nobel prizes.

glad that I was finished with reading it.

"Claude Simon was born in 1913 at Tananarive (Madagascar). His parents were French, his father being a career officer who was killed in the first World War. He grew up with his mother and her family in Perpignan in the middle of the wine district of Roussillon. Among his ancestors was a general from the time of the French Revolution.




After secondary school at Collège Stanislas in Paris and brief sojourns at Oxford and Cambridge he took courses in painting at the André Lhote Academy. He then travelled extensively through Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Greece. This experience as well as those from the Second World War show up in his literary work. At the beginning of the war Claude Simon took part in the battle of the Meuse (1940) and was taken prisoner. He managed to escape and joined the resistance movement. At the same time he completed his first novel, Le Tricheur ("The Cheat", published in 1946), which he had started to write before the war.




He lives in Paris and spends part of the year at Salses in the Pyrenees.




In 1961 Claude Simon received the prize of l'Express for "La Route des Flandres" and in 1967 the Médicis prize for "Histoire". The University of East Anglia made him honorary doctor in 1973.




Works


Le Tricheur/The Cheat 1945


La Corde Raide/The Tightrope 1947


Gulliver 1952


Le Sacre du printemps/The Anointment of Spring 1954


Le vent. Tentative de restitution d 'un rétable baroque/The Wind. Attempted Restoration of a Baroque Altarpiece 1957


L'Herbe/The Grass 1958


La Route des Flandres/The Flanders Road 1960


Le Palace/The Palace 1962


La Separation/The Separation 1963 (Play adapted from the novel L'Herbe)


Femmes/Women. Ill by Joan Miró. - New edition entitled La Chevelure de Bérénice/Berenice's Hair 1984


Histoire/Story 1967


La Bataille de Pharsale/The Battle of Pharsalus 1969


Orion aveugle. Essai/Blind Orion. Essay 1970


Les Corps conducteurs/Conducting Bodies 1971


Triptyque/Triptych 1973


Leçon de choses/Lesson in Things 1975


Les Géorgiques/The Georgics 1981


L'Invitation/The Invitation 1987


L'Acacia/The Acacia 1989 "




-From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1981-1990.-

I neither recommend nor do not recommend this book. You have to see it for yourselves. Its author is a Nobel Laureate. So far be it from me, to find fault with anything.


As far as I am concerned the Emperor has clothes on, but he's wearing rags and people are saying that the Emperor has made a fashion statement.


To be fair, some statements in praise of this author or this book are:


"One of France's most eminent novelists and...one of the most inventive and truly profound exponents of fiction anywhere." The NY Times Book Review


"Claude Simon's is the most powerful talent to have appeared since the war." Saturday Review


"Verbal description has never been more of an art, or used more decisively that it is in The World About Us" Times Literary Supplement

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Created Feb 26, 2002 at 1:16pm • Submit your own review...