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

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.

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 book introduces novels by the Nobel Prize for Literature author, Claude Simon, giving emphasis to peaks in his literary achievement.

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.

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.

Since his international breakthrough with 1960's La Route des Flandres, Claude Simon has captivated readers worldwide with his relentless examination of interior life - in particular his own. Breaking from realistic narrative, obsessed with the power (and betrayals) of memory, The Jardin des Plantes is nothing less than an inquiry into what creates each of us. While admitting that there are defining moments in one's life - eight days of battle during World War II was Simon's unforgettable experience - The Jardin des Plantes rings with his refusal to be defined by any single event. His thoughts show the complexity, the fabulous chaos, that makes up the experience of life for Simon and, he insists, for all thinking human beings. These memories - whether everyday minutiae or passages from novels or the staggering experiences of war and death - unreel like films, constantly replaying or stopping and starting according to the whimsical or terrifying nature of his experiences. The juxtapositions may hold meaning, or be nothing more a than a trick of the mind. What is important is that each memory has a place in his mind and each has an effect on his self and the way he projects that self