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The Flanders Road

The Flanders Road

by Claude Simon, translated from the French by Richard Howard, introduction by Jerry W. Carlson

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On a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army’s panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was among the French forces. As they retreated, he saw his captain shot off his horse by a German sniper.

This is the primal scene to which Simon returns repeatedly in his fiction and nowhere so powerfully as in his most famous novel The Flanders Road. Here Simon’s own memories overlap with those of his central character, Georges, whose captain, a distant relative, dies a similar death. Georges reviews the circumstances and sense—or senselessness—of that death, first in the company of a fellow prisoner in a POW camp and then some years later in the course of an ever more erotically charged visit to the captain’s widow, Corinne. As he does, other stories emerge: Corinne’s prewar affair with the jockey Iglésia, who would become the captain’s orderly; the possible suicide of an eighteenth-century ancestor, whose grim portrait loomed large in Georges’s childhood home; Georges’s learned father, whose books are no help against barbarism. The great question throughout, the question that must be urgently asked even as it remains unanswerable, is whether fiction can confront and respond to the trauma of history.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681375953
Pages: 208
Publication Date:

Praise

To read this unforgettable book with complete attention is to get lost. . . in a way that not only reawakens one’s sense of the terror of war but also revitalizes one’s understanding of the possibilities of narrative.
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

[An] authoritative translation. . . Simon’s primary characteristic as a novelist – indeed that which made him an exemplary Nouveau Romancier and a rare jewel among Nobel Laureates when he received his prize in 1985 – was his desire to find and create other narrative shapes, ones which frustrated the closures of life and death, comedy and tragedy. Ones which allowed him to linger among the difficulties and the traps of storytelling as such.
—Ben Libman, New Left Review’s Sidecar

The ferocious drive of the prose, the images of love and war tossed up like spray out of the struggling rush and turmoil of words, is stupendous.
Kirkus Reviews

Simon [is] a ‘writer’s writer,’ questioning language’s utility as he employs it to breathtaking effect.
Publishers Weekly

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