Claude Simon

Claude Simon (Tananarive, Madagascar, 1913 – Paris, 2005) was a French novelist and one of the central figures of the nouveau roman, the movement that in the second half of the twentieth century rethought what a novel could be. In 1985 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, for work the Swedish Academy praised as combining the creativity of a poet with that of a painter, with a deep sense of time in its portrayal of the human condition. His writing, shaped by war and memory, cannot be separated from his own life.

He was born in Madagascar, then a French colony. His father, an army officer, was killed in the First World War when Claude was a small child, and he was raised by his mother's family in Perpignan, near the Spanish border. After school in Paris he studied painting at the academy of the Cubist André Lhote, and that visual training left its mark on his prose. In 1936 he went to Barcelona and volunteered with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side. When the Second World War broke out he fought in France, was captured by the Germans, escaped, and joined the Resistance. He later settled in Roussillon, bought a property at Salses and farmed vines, and only then devoted himself fully to writing.

His first novel, Le Tricheur, appeared in 1946, but his mature work arrived with La Route des Flandres (1960), a novel about the French defeat of 1940 that brought him wide attention. Simon wrote very long sentences, with parenthetical asides that can take pages to close, broke up chronological order, and blended voices and streams of consciousness without clear markers. His models were Proust and Faulkner more than his fellow nouveau romanciers, with whom he shared mainly the break from convention. War, horses, family history and old age run through nearly all his books. Histoire (1967) won the Médicis prize, and Les Géorgiques (1981) and L'Acacia (1989) return to family memory and the echoes of several wars.

His legacy is that of an author of great prestige whom the Nobel brought to a far larger readership. In his last years he lived quietly between the south of France and Paris, and in 2001 he published Le Tramway, an autobiography in which he described himself as a difficult author. He died in 2005. His influence lies in fiction that treats fragmentation and memory as the very material of the novel rather than as decoration.