Claude Simon Adventures in Words

by Duncan, Alastair

• ISBN13: 9780719064845
• ISBN10: 0719064848
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-04-19
• Publisher: Manchester University Press

Summary

This Book Aims to introduce new readers to the fiction of Claude Simon, Nobel prize-winner and the most prestigious of France's living novelists. Simon's first novel appeared in 1945, his most recent, The Tramway, in 2001. At the core of his most famous work, The Flanders Road (1960), lies a traumatising experience of war in May 1940. This experience Simon reworks from novel to novel. With it he interweaves memories from childhood to old age, and parallel stories of love and war from the rich past of his family as far back as the French Revolution. Simon's prose unrolls with an epic splendour, but it can also be objective and precise. To the sweeping force of history Simon opposes human endurance and a hallucinatory attention to ordinary sights and sounds which for him, as for Proust or Faulkner, form the living substance of memory.

Author Biography

Alastair Duncan is Senior Lecturer in French, University of Stirling.

Table of Contents

List of plates	p. vi
Preface	p. vii
Abbreviations	p. viii
Introduction	p. 1
La Route des Flandres: adventure in words	p. 12
Ricardou, Simon and La Bataille de Pharsale	p. 31
Hierarchy and coherence: La Bataille de Pharsale to Lecon de choses	p. 53
Les Georgiques and intertextuality	p. 68
Autobiographical fictions: La Corde raide to Les Georgiques	p. 89
Psychobiographical fictions: Le Tricheur to Lecon de choses	p. 108
L'Acacia: myths of history, family and self	p. 128
Le Jardin des Plantes and Le Tramway: coherence without closure	p. 153
Notes	p. 175
Bibliography	p. 215
Index	p. 228
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