Claude Simon

Claude Simon was born in 1913 in Tananarive (now Antananarivo), Madagascar, to French parents; his father, a career officer, was killed in action in the First World War, and he was raised by his mother’s family in Perpignan, among the vineyards of Roussillon. After school in Paris he studied painting under André Lhote, an apprenticeship whose concern with composition and surface would shape his prose. In 1936 he went to Barcelona and sided with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Called up in 1939 as a cavalryman, he survived the destruction of his squadron on the Meuse in May 1940, was captured, and escaped from a prison camp later that year.

These experiences, together with the history of his own family, became the matter of almost everything he wrote. After a few relatively conventional early novels, The Wind (1957) and The Grass (1958) brought him into the orbit of the nouveau roman. The Flanders Road (1960), a dense reconstruction of a cavalry rout and the death of a captain, is often counted his finest achievement. In long, parenthetical sentences indebted to Proust and Faulkner, Simon dissolves chronology into simultaneous layers of perception and recollection, setting the visual detail of a scene beside its slow erosion in memory. Histoire, Triptych and The Georgics, which interweaves an ancestor’s life in the Revolutionary armies with his own war, carried the method further.

Simon lived in Paris and spent part of each year at Salses, near Perpignan, and he liked to say his profession was winegrower rather than writer. He received the Nobel Prize in 1985, went on to publish The Acacia (1989) and Le Jardin des Plantes (1997), and died in Paris in 2005.