Claude (Eug - Style and influences, Works

Novelist, born in Tananarive, C Madagascar. He was educated at Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, fought in World War 2, and later earned a living producing wine at Salses. His novels include Le Vent (1957, The Wind), L'Herbe (1958, The Grass), and - part of a four-volume cycle - La Route des Flandres (1960, The Flanders Road). Later works include Le tramway (2001, The Trolley). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985.

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Claude Simon (10 October 1913 – 6 July 2005) was a French novelist and the 1985 Nobel Laureate in Literature.

Style and influences

Simon is sometimes 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. 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). War is a constant and central theme (indeed it is present in one form or another in almost all of Simon's published works), and Simon often contrasts various individuals' experiences of different historical conflicts in a single novel;

Works

Le Tricheur/The Cheat 1945 La Corde Raide/The Tightrope 1947 Gulliver 1952 Le Sacre du printemps/The Anointment of Spring 1954 Le vent. Attempted Restoration of a Baroque Altarpiece 1957 L'Herbe/The Grass 1958 La Route des Flandres/The Flanders Road 1960 Le Palace/The Palace 1962 La Separation/The Separation 1963 (Play adapted from the novel L'Herbe) Femmes/Women. - New edition entitled La Chevelure de Bérénice/Berenice's Hair 1984 Histoire/Story 1967 La Bataille de Pharsale/The Battle of Pharsalus 1969 Orion aveugle. Essay 1970 Les Corps conducteurs/Conducting Bodies 1971 Triptyque/Triptych 1973 Leçon de choses/Lesson in Things 1975 Les Géorgiques/The Georgics 1981 L'Invitation/The Invitation 1987 L'Acacia/The Acacia 1989 Le jardin des plantes/The Jardin des Plantes 1997 Le tramway/The Trolley 2001 Œuvres, Collection Pléiade, Gallimard 2006[with Le Vent, tentative de restitution d'un retable baroque (1957), La Route des Flandres (1960), Le Palace (1962) La Bataille de Pharsale (1969), La Chevelure de Bérénice (Reprise du texte Femmes, 1972), Triptyque (1973), le Discours de Stockholm (1986, texte prononcé à l'occasion de la remise du Prix Nobel) and Le Jardin des Plantes (1997)]