The Flanders RoadBy 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. |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
able already animal answering apparently Blum body boots breathing closed clothes coming completely covered dark dead didn't difference door dressed earth empty expression eyes face falling feeling finally flesh four front furious Georges give gradually green grey hand happening head hear heard hedge holding horse Iglésia inside keep kind later least leaving legs light lips listening longer looking lying managed mean merely moment motionless mouth moving neck never night once passed perhaps probably raising reached realizing Reixach ride road round running saying screaming seemed seen shadow shoulder side silent sitting skin slowly soldiers somehow sound speak standing starting stiff stopped suppose taking talking tell things thinking thought tiny trees trying turning voice Wack waiting walking wall watching whole woman wood