Download or read book The Flanders Road written by Claude Simon and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature, a riveting, stylistically audacious modernist epic about the French cavalry's bloody face-off against German Panzer tanks during WWII. 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.
Download or read book The Flanders Road written by Claude Simon and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Captain de Reixach is killed by a German sniper, three of his fellow soldiers look back on his life.
Download or read book The Trolley written by Claude Simon and published by . This book was released on 2004-01 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intertwining the memories of youth and old age, this evocative novel by the French Nobel laureate uses the trolley as a symbol of life as it becomes the mode of transportation that takes the child to school every morning and is transformed into a mobile hospital bed for the man entering into old age.
Download or read book The Jardin Des Plantes written by Claude Simon and published by books catalog. This book was released on 2001 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since his international breakthrough with 1960's La Route des Flandres, Claude Simon has captivated readers worldwide with his relentless examination of interior life - in particular his own. Breaking from realistic narrative, obsessed with the power (and betrayals) of memory, The Jardin des Plantes is nothing less than an inquiry into what creates each of us. While admitting that there are defining moments in one's life - eight days of battle during World War II was Simon's unforgettable experience - The Jardin des Plantes rings with his refusal to be defined by any single event. His thoughts show the complexity, the fabulous chaos, that makes up the experience of life for Simon and, he insists, for all thinking human beings. These memories - whether everyday minutiae or passages from novels or the staggering experiences of war and death - unreel like films, constantly replaying or stopping and starting according to the whimsical or terrifying nature of his experiences. The juxtapositions may hold meaning, or be nothing more a than a trick of the mind. What is important is that each memory has a place in his mind and each has an effect on his self and the way he projects that self
Download or read book Triptych written by Claude Simon and published by Calder Publications Limited. This book was released on 1977 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A failed marriage, the accidental death of a child by drowning, and an incident at a summer resort are the subject matter of these three stories, interwoven and told out of sequence.
Download or read book The Invitation written by Claude Simon and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1987 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Claude Simon is a sardonic look at glasnost Russia, where recent reforms and improvements carry all the conviction of rouge on a corpse. The narrator is one of fifteen international guests who have been invited on a goodwill tour of the new Soviet Union. Whisked from one staged event to another, from Moscow to Central Asia, enduring hours of rigid Soviet hospitality, the guests react with varying degrees of stupefaction and disgust to a society whose recent renovations ill-disguise a bloody and repressive past. The Invitation is a reminder that although the Cold War may be over, the past cannot and should not be forgotten; the Soviets have a new game to play--diplomacy rather than military force--but Simon voices skepticism in our current era of pro-Soviet sentiment. The chief attraction of The Invitation is Simon's celebrated style: long, convoluted sentences register the narrator's impressions, sometimes dragging with fatigue, but always sharpened with sensuous details and spiked with mordant satire. No one is named, but the reader will see through their identities as easily as the narrator sees through the sham of perestroika. This compact masterpiece of political satire concludes with an afterword by Lois Oppenheim, a noted authority on Simon's work.
Download or read book The Novels of Claude Simon written by J. A. E. Loubère and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lucid and illuminating study traces the development of an extraordinary experimental writer from his earliest work of the 1940's to his most recent fiction. Ms. Loubère assesses Simon's aims and achievements, and parallels his development as a novelist to the development of the modern novel itself, showing how both moved from traditionalist forms and material toward the highly idiosyncratic "New Novel." After discussing his early works, she devotes a chapter each to Le Vent, L'Herbe, La Route des Flandres, Le Palace, Histoire, La Bataille de Pharsale, Les Corps conducteurs, and Triptyque. Step by step, she points out the changes in technique and focus that occur in each succeeding novel as Simon rejects conventional forms and introduces new ones.
Download or read book The Georgics written by Claude Simon and published by London : J. Calder ; New York : Riverrun Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Events from the French Revolution through the twentieth century, including the Spanish Civil War and the defeat of France in 1940, are interwoven to present an ironic view of history and the folly and wastefulness of war.
Download or read book The Grass written by Claude Simon and published by George Braziller. This book was released on 1986 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The World about Us written by Claude Simon and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book When Novels Were Books written by Jordan Alexander Stein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary scholar explains how eighteenth-century novels were manufactured, sold, bought, owned, collected, and read alongside Protestant religious texts. As the novel developed into a mature genre, it had to distinguish itself from these similar-looking books and become what we now call “literature.” Literary scholars have explained the rise of the Anglophone novel using a range of tools, from Ian Watt’s theories to James Watt’s inventions. Contrary to established narratives, When Novels Were Books reveals that the genre beloved of so many readers today was not born secular, national, middle-class, or female. For the first three centuries of their history, novels came into readers’ hands primarily as printed sheets ordered into a codex bound along one edge between boards or paper wrappers. Consequently, they shared some formal features of other codices, such as almanacs and Protestant religious books produced by the same printers. Novels are often mistakenly credited for developing a formal feature (“character”) that was in fact incubated in religious books. The novel did not emerge all at once: it had to differentiate itself from the goods with which it was in competition. Though it was written for sequential reading, the early novel’s main technology for dissemination was the codex, a platform designed for random access. This peculiar circumstance led to the genre’s insistence on continuous, cover-to-cover reading even as the “media platform” it used encouraged readers to dip in and out at will and read discontinuously. Jordan Alexander Stein traces this tangled history, showing how the physical format of the book shaped the stories that were fit to print.
Download or read book Diosamante written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and published by Humanoids Inc. This book was released on 2014-03-19 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diosamante, the beautiful, egotistical queen falls passionately in love with a king. To prove herself worthy, she begins a long journey in search of self-perfection.
Download or read book Austerlitz written by W.G. Sebald and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2011-12-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. G. Sebald’s celebrated masterpiece, “one of the supreme works of art of our time” (The Guardian), follows a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. “Haunting . . . a powerful and resonant work of the historical imagination . . . Reminiscent at once of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Kafka’s troubled fables of guilt and apprehension, and, of course, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, and New York Magazine Best Book of the Year Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Koret Jewish Book Award, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, Austerlitz follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion. Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W. G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is—a struggle to impose coherence on memory that embodies the universal human search for identity.
Download or read book The Book of Grimoires written by Claude Lecouteux and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extensive study of ancient books of magic and the magical practices preserved in the few surviving grimoires • Includes spells, talisman formulations, and secret magical alphabets reproduced from the author’s private collection of grimoires, with instructions for their use • Explains the basic principles of medieval magic, including the doctrine of names and the laws of sympathy and contagion • Offers an overview of magic in the Western Mystery tradition Grimoires began simply as quick-reference “grammar books” for sorcerers, magicians, and priests before evolving into comprehensive guides to magic, complete with spell-casting rituals, magical alphabets, and instructions to create amulets and talismans. With the advent of the printing press, some grimoires were mass produced, but many of the abbreviations were misinterpreted and magical words misspelled, rendering them ineffective. The most powerful grimoires remained not only secret but also heavily encoded, making them accessible only to the highest initiates of the magical traditions. Drawing on his own private collection of grimoires and magical manuscripts as well as his privileged access to the rare book archives of major European universities, Claude Lecouteux offers an extensive study of ancient books of magic and the ways the knowledge within them was kept secret for centuries through symbols, codes, secret alphabets, and Kabbalistic words. Touching on both white and black magical practices, he explains the basic principles of medieval magic, including the doctrine of names and signatures, mastery of the power of images, and the laws of sympathy and contagion. He gives an overview of magic in the Western Mystery tradition, emphasizing both lesser-known magicians such as Trithemus and Peter of Apono and famous ones like Albertus Magnus and Hermes Trismegistus. Creating a universal grimoire, Lecouteux provides exact reproductions of secret magical alphabets, symbols, and glyphs with instructions for their use as well as an illustrated collection of annotated spells, rituals, and talismans for numerous applications including amorous magic, healing magic, and protection rites. The author also examines the folk magic that resulted when the high magic of the medieval grimoires melded with the preexisting pagan magic of ancient Europe.
Download or read book New Novel New Wave New Politics written by Lynn A. Higgins and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Novel, New Wave, New Politics overturns this traditional approach. Lynn A. Higgins argues that the New Novelists (e.g., Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras) and New Wave filmmakers (e.g., Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais) "engage in a kind of historiography....
Download or read book The Claude Glass written by Tom Bullough and published by Sort of Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the Welsh Borders in 1980, "The Claude Glass" charts an unlikely friendship between two neighbours: Robin, the seven year old son of English hippie sheep farmers, and Andrew, a child so neglected by his impoverished parents that he is left almost mute, seeking solace among the farm dogs. Exploring his parents' semi-derelict farmhouse, Andrew finds an antique convex mirror - a Claude Glass - and, gazing into it, the two boys see their wild, rural landscape strangely ordered. But this comforting vision proves fragile as tensions and sexual jealousy rock the adult world around them. Written with a lyricism and freshness that echoes the work of Bruce Chatwin and Esther Freud, "The Claude Glass" draws you into the lives of its startling characters and their tarnished romance with nature.
Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by David Lodge and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.
