Claude simon

Claude Simon (Antananarivo, Madagascar, October 10, 1913-Paris, July 6, 2005) was a French writer, considered one of the fathers of the nouveau roman. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985 for the quality of his novels, "which combine the creativity of the poet and that of the painter in bearing profound testimony to the complexity of the human condition."

Biography

She was born on the island of Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa, which, at the time, was a French colony. A year later, his father, an army officer, was killed in World War I and Claude settled with his mother in Perpignan, in south-eastern France (near the Spanish border), where Claude's grandmother lived. he.

After finishing secondary school at the Collège Stanislas in Paris and after brief academic stays at Oxford and Cambridge, he studied painting at the Academy of the cubist master André Lhote and also at Oxford and Cambridge. He traveled through Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Greece. This experience, as well as that of World War II, will play a very important role in his literary work.

In 1936 he traveled to Barcelona and fought in the Civil War on the side of the Republic. The experience of this war would inspire some of his best books such as Le Palace ( The Palace , 1962) or Le jardin des plantes in 1997.

At the outbreak of World War II, he participated in the Battle of the Meuse (1940), but was arrested by the Germans who sent him to a prison camp in Saxony. On transfer to a prison camp in France, he managed to escape and joined the French Resistance movement. He took refuge in the south-east of France, then a free zone, where he bought a property in Salses, near Perpignan and became a winegrower who loved painting and photography, before dedicating himself to writing.

His first work as a writer, Le Tricheur (The Trickster) was published in 1946 and a year later La Corde Raide (The Tightrope), but it was in 1960 that his first literary success was published, La Route des Flandres (The Flanders Route), which deals with about the French military defeat in 1940 and for which he would receive the Nouvelle vague prize in 1961. In 1967 he would obtain a new award, the French avant-garde Médicis prize, for his book Histoire ( Historia, 1967), which recounts an ordinary day in the life of a young man. This work confirmed him as a prestigious and minority author, a consideration that will not change until he obtains the Nobel.

Together with Robbe-Grillet and other writers such as Nathalie Sarraute, Robert Pinget, Samuel Beckett, Jean Ricardou and Claude Ollier, he was part of the nouveau roman literary group that emerged in France in 1950, which briefly had also by members Michel Butor and Marguerite Duras.

In 1981 Les Géorgiques (The Georgics, 1981) came to light, where in three different eras and in periods of turmoil and violence —the French Revolution, the War Spanish Civil and World War II— three characters live events and experiences that seem to overlap. In this book the author once again reflects on his experience on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. When awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985, the Swedish Academy mentioned this novel as perhaps his most important work.

In 1989 he published L'Acacia (La acacia), a strongly autobiographical novel that is recognized as a masterpiece of antiwar literature. In this work she describes her journey with her mother and her aunt through devastated France in 1918 in search of her father's grave.

The University of East Anglia made him an honorary doctor in 1973.

In recent years, he has lived in retirement from success, alternately in the south of France (in Roussillon) and incognito in Paris, near the botanical garden that gave the title to one of his novels Le jardin des plantes (1997).

In 2001, at the age of 88, he published his last novel, Le tramway (The tramway), an autobiography with memories of his childhood and old age in which he describes himself himself as a "difficult, boring, unreadable and confusing" author.

He died on July 6, 2005 at the age of 91. French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who expressed his “deepest sadness” over Simon's death, said in his statement "French literature has lost one of its great authors”.

Works

• Le Tricheur (The cheater), 1945
• The Corde Raide (The rope is loose), 1947
• Gulliver1952
• Le Sacre du printemps (The Consecration of Spring), 1954
• Le vent (The wind), 1957
• L'Herbe (The grass), 1958
• Le Cheval (The Horse), 1958.
• La Route des Flandres (The route of Flanders), 1960
• Le Palace (The Palace), 1962
• The Separation (Separation), 1963
• Histoire (History), 1967
• The Battle of Pharsale (The Battle of Farsalia), 1969
• Orion aveugle (Blind Orion), 1970
• Les Corps conducteurs (Driver bodies), 1971
• Triptyque (Triptych), 1973
• Leçon de choses (Lesson of things), 1975
• Les Géorgiques (The Geórgicas), 1981
• Femmes (Women), 1984
• The Chevelure of Bergenice (The Berenice scalp), 1984
• Discours de Stockholm (Speech in Stockholm), 1986
• L'Invitation (The invitation), 1987
• Album d'un amateur (Album of an amateur), 1988
• L'Acacia (The acacia), 1989
• Le garden des plantes (The flower garden), 1997
• Le tramway (The tram), 2001

Predecessor: Jaroslav Seifert

Nobel Prize in Literature 1985

Successor: Wole Soyinka