Product Description
Chapters: People From Antananarivo, Claude Simon, Patrick Ramiaramanana, Roland Ratsiraka, Charles Rabemananjara, Philippe Jeantot, Jean Joseph Rabearivelo, Richard Ratsimandrava, Armand Razafindratandra, Pascal Rakotomavo, D'gary, Nicole Ramalalanirina, Dally Randriantefy, Raymond Ranjeva, Elia Ravelomanantsoa, Madagascar Slim, Gabriel Ramanantsoa, Lalao Ravalomanana, Philippe Eidel. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 51. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Claude Simon (10 October 1913, 6 July 2005) was a French novelist and the 1985 Nobel Laureate in Literature. He was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, and died in Paris, France. Simon is often identified with the nouveau roman movement exemplified in the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, and while his fragmented narratives certainly contain some of the formal disruption characteristic of that movement (in particular Triptyque from 1973), he nevertheless retains a strong sense of narrative and character. In fact, Simon arguably has much more in common with his Modernist predecessors than with his contemporaries; in particular, the works of Marcel Proust and William Faulkner are a clear influence. Simon's use of self-consciously long sentences (often stretching across many pages and with parentheses sometimes interrupting a clause which is only completed pages later) can be seen to reference Proust's own style, and Simon morever makes use of certain Proustian settings (in La Route des Flandres, for example, the narrator's captain de Reixach is shot by a sniper concealed behind a hawthorn hedge or haie d'aubépines, a reference to the meeting between Gilberte and the narrator across a hawthorn hedge in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu). The Faulknerian influence is evident in the novels' extensive use of a fractured ti...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=335247 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A modern masterpiece
It's a mystery why Claude Simon is not more widely read in the U.S. A recent visit to the largest bookstore in San Francisco revealed not one copy of any of his books, and he is hardly an unknown or obscure author (Nobel Prize winner in 1985).It would certainly not be an eccentric view,and one I would not be the first to suggest, that he could easily be rankedclose to the "big four" of 20th Century literature (Beckett,Faulkner, Joyce, Proust) and based on the four Simon novels I have read, Iwould agree."The Grass" is a great place to start with Simon. It is his fourth novel, but the second translated into English.("TheWind", translated a year earlier, is also a good starting point) It ishelpful to read this novelist in chronological order, as it is with mostimportant authors, but even more here as Simon's style has considerablyevolved over the course of his career. Also, as this novel is part of afive-book cycle (the "Reixach Cycle") in which some of thecharacters reappear in other books, it is best to read them in order.Hisreputation as a "difficult" writer is somewhat undeserved, and nomore than ordinary alertness will allow the reader to enjoy an incrediblysupple and rich experience.The translations are excellent, as far as Ican tell,judging from my limited reading of him in French, and are mostly by the poet Richard Howard, as is "The Grass."This noveltells of a post-World War II family in France, largely three women, and thenarrative is loosely constructed around their memories and experiences,particularly those of a young woman who describes the journey towards deathof her husband's aunt.The book, as other Simon novels, is verydeath-haunted and are filled with asense of melancholy and dread.Thedescriptions of nature and the countryside are amazingly lyrical. Simon'sheroic experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side in the SpanishCivil War and as a prisoner of war in WW2 and a member of the Frenchresistance also show up in his fiction, especially "The Palace"and "The Flanders Road" which I also highly enjoyed. This was thefirst Simon novel I read, and I definately intend to read the others. ... Read more