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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Where to begin with Claude Simon,
By hj (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Palace (Calderbooks) (Paperback)
Claude Simon won the Nobel Prize for literature and is routinely listed as one of the greatest authors of the last century, but he doesn't seem to have found much of a readership in the English-speaking world. I can't judge the French originals but the translated versions are interesting in their own right. [Note: Given that the Amazon listed title is THE not LE Palace I'm reviewing this as the commonly available Richard Howard English translation] Translations of Simon's books go in and out of print but are not that difficult to track down. Where to start? I'm writing this review as a way of suggesting THE PALACE.
Simon's narratives are written as a kind of Proustian reverie, endlessly circulating around a set of recurring memories: a traumatic scene, a glimpsed image, an overheard fragment of conversation etc. In Proust one memory triggers another or a commentary or another idea. Simon works in a similar way, via cumulative association and digression. Sentences become very long and often contain parentheses within parentheses. They also tend to be written in present continuous tenses, representing the ongoing act of remembering itself. Narratives might switch back and forth between viewpoints and between times. All this is not quite as forbidding as it sounds. Simon was influenced by Faulkner and if you know novels like LIGHT IN AUGUST then Simon's juxtapositions of place, time and perspective will seem quite familiar. Another Faulkner-influence novelist, Toni Morrison, is very popular right now and her writing resembles that of Simon in a number of ways, so maybe he will find a readership yet. THE FLANDERS ROAD was Simon's breakthrough novel, where he established his style. He consolidated with subsequent novels in the 1960s such as THE PALACE. In the 1970s he went "post structuralist" using linguistic association rather than memory to trigger his narratives. These books read a bit like Burrough's cut-ups. Since the 1980s he has returned to the style and concerns of books like THE PALACE. I found THE PALACE (1962) more accessible than FLANDERS ROAD, perhaps because it has a more obvious and sustained set of narrative strands. The narrator is a tourist visiting Barcelona in the 1950s. A large hotel (the palace of the title) triggers a set of memories from the 1930s, when he was a volunteer fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The hotel was then the headquarters of his revolutionary faction. Memories of the violence, the boredom and squalor of war mix with memories of personal relationships and sexual jealousies amongst the combatants. Although the narrative shifts back and forth in time, it is divided into five fairly clear chapters, organized thematically. Also clear is the overall message of the novel: that the Spanish Civil War (all war/revolution?) was not heroic, especially to its participants, but doomed to failure and that history is a cycle of such failures. There is something of the grumpy old man about Simon! He returned to the events in Barcelona in a 1980s novel THE GEORGICS (also worth reading) which, like THE PALACE, is in explicit dialogue with Orwell's HOMAGE TO CATALONIA. The political and historical substance, along with the relatively accessible story (obviously autobiographical), make THE PALACE a good place to start reading Claude Simon.
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