Background
Simon was born on October 19, 1913, in Tananarive, Madagascar, to French parents.
(Events from the French Revolution through the twentieth c...)
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
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0714538973/?tag=2022091-20
(Beginning in 1919 with a young boy and his mother searchi...)
Beginning in 1919 with a young boy and his mother searching for the grave of his soldier father, and continuing through the coming of World War II, this novel examines the brutality and destructive impact of war
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394587715/?tag=2022091-20
(Three separate stories, about a failed marriage, a child'...)
Three separate stories, about a failed marriage, a child's death, and a summer holiday, are told currently in a structure designed to resemble a three-sided painting
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/071453787X/?tag=2022091-20
(Antoine Montes, a stranger with a mysterious past, arrive...)
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
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807611573/?tag=2022091-20
( Claude Simon, a Nobel Prizewinning author and cultural...)
Claude Simon, a Nobel Prizewinning author and cultural icon in France, has written a Proustian novel, intermingling the memories of youth and old age. His madeleine is the trolley of the books title, the transport that took him to and from school every morning of his childhood. Passing back and forth between vine-covered hills, the trolley punctuates the trivial or cruel events of many lives, while action unfolds at the shore, in the gradually modernizing town, on a tennis court, and in a country villa. Elsewhere, life in all its fragility persists in the pavilions and labyrinthine corridors of a hospital, where our narrator now travels on a wheeled hospital bed, set to begin a new voyage into old age. When coincidences unite the two trajectories, the story becomes a fugue of memory that has delighted critics and made the book an immediate bestseller in France.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1565848578/?tag=2022091-20
Simon was born on October 19, 1913, in Tananarive, Madagascar, to French parents.
He attended the College Stanislas in Paris, studied painting with André Lhote, and later went to Oxford and Cambridge.
During the Spanish Civil War, he joined the Republicans as a gunrunner, an experience he later mocked in Le Palace (1962; The Palace). He was mobilized at the start of World War II, witnessed the grim French defeat at the Battle of the Meuse in May 1940, and was taken prisoner, events that became significant fictional material in La Route des Flandres (1960; The Flanders Road). Despite considerable evolution in style and construction, his work remains closely tied to the visual realms of painting and collage. While Simon's early novels, Le Tricheur (1945; "The Trickster"), Gulliver (1952), and Le Sacre du printemps (1954; "The Coronation of Spring"), attracted little attention from the critics, certain persistent notions of style and composition as well as thematic content were already apparent the disruption of conventional chronology, the use of multiple points of view, digression, the preeminence of memory, the unsettling role of chance. Critics generally view the publications of Le Vent (1957; The Wind) and L'Herbe (1958; The Grass) as initial signs of Simon's maturing style and greater consistency of tone. In both of these novels, a single narrative consciousness attempts to restore order and give a particular significance to a series of past events, memories, and contradictory points of view, but ultimately fails to do so. La Route des Flandres and Histoire (1967; translated as Histoire) are two of Simon's best known novels and have many similarities, notably a narrative consciousness who speculates about events of the past while continually correcting his impressions of them. La Bataille de Pharsale (1969; The Battle of Pharsalus) and Les Corps conducteurs (1971; Conducting Bodies) mark a turning point as Simon moves away from questions of historical veracity, recollection, continuity versus discontinuity, the functioning of consciousness, and narrative action (however minimal). Instead he focuses on the raw materials of writing the generating properties of words, images, and literary signs; how meanings are textually produced and reproduced. Language itself becomes the narrative source of investigation and discovery. Elements from previous works as well as textual fragments from other writers are incorporated. Simon also exploits the representational characteristics of film, painting, postcards, and photographs. In Les Georgiques (1981; The Georgics, 1989), Simon returns to thematic concerns of the 1960's--the repetitive nature of history, the cyclical forces of death, disintegration, and renewal, resistance to hierarchy and absolutes. Yet he continues to explore postmodernist preoccupations with the construction and deconstruction of meaning through language and the complex distinctions between fiction, history, and everyday reality. He died on July 6, 2005 at the age of 91.
(Events from the French Revolution through the twentieth c...)
(Beginning in 1919 with a young boy and his mother searchi...)
(Antoine Montes, a stranger with a mysterious past, arrive...)
(Three separate stories, about a failed marriage, a child'...)
( Claude Simon, a Nobel Prizewinning author and cultural...)
(A young woman talks to her lover about her dying aunt, re...)
Quotations:
"Life is not only full of sound and fury. It also has butterflies, flowers, art. "
"For me, the big chore is always the same: how to begin a sentence, how to continue it, how to complete it. "
"There is no such thing as a 'real' representation of 'reality. ' Except, perhaps, in algebraic formulae. "
"To begin with, our perception of the world is deformed, incomplete. Then our memory is selective. "