My favorite French writer has been for many years Claude Simon, whose books I am just re-reading now. A second reading makes it much easier to enjoy this difficult author, who fascinated me from the first book I read of him (Le Jardin des Plantes). Much of Claude Simon’s writing is autobiographical dealing with personal experiences from World War 2 and the Spanish Civil War and his family history. His early novels are largely traditional in form, but with Le vent (1957) and L’Herbe (1958) he developed a style associated with the Nouveau Roman. La Route de Flandres (1960) tells about wartime experiences, in Triptyque (1973) three different stories are mixed together without paragraph breaks. The novels Histoire (1967), Les Géorgiques (1981) and L’Acacia (1989) are largely about Simon’s family history. Simon’s principal obsession, however, is with the ways in which humans experience time (an admittedly Modernist fascination). The novels often dwell on images of old-age, such as the decaying ‘LSM’ or the old woman (Cassandra’) in Les Géorgiques, which are frequently seen through the uncomprehending eyes of childhood. Simon’s use of family history equally attempts to show how individuals exist in history—that is, how they might feel implicated in the lives and stories of their ancestors who died long ago.
Here a fascinating early interview, dealing with the challenges awaiting the reader in relation to the early novel L’Herbe(1958).
