Claude Simon facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Claude Simon
|
|
|---|---|
Simon in 1967
|
|
| Born | 10 October 1913 Antananarivo, French Madagascar |
| Died | 6 July 2005 (aged 91) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | French |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Literature 1985 |
Claude Simon (born October 10, 1913 – died July 6, 2005) was a famous French writer. He won the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature for his unique way of telling stories.
Contents
About His Life
Claude Simon was born in Antananarivo on the island of Madagascar. His parents were French. His father was a soldier who died in World War I. Claude grew up with his mother and her family in Perpignan, a city in France known for its wine.
After finishing high school in Paris, he briefly studied at Oxford and Cambridge universities. He also took painting classes. He traveled a lot, visiting Spain, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Greece. These trips, along with his experiences in World War II, greatly influenced his books.
When World War II began, Claude Simon fought in the battle of the Meuse in 1940 and was captured. But he managed to escape and joined the resistance movement, which fought against the occupation. Around this time, he finished his first novel, Le Tricheur (which means "The Cheat"), published in 1946.
He lived in Paris but spent part of each year in Salses, a town in the Pyrenees mountains. In 1961, he won the L'Express prize for his book La Route des Flandres. In 1967, he received the Médicis prize for Histoire. The University of East Anglia in England gave him an honorary doctor's degree in 1973.
His Novels
Many of Claude Simon's books are about his own life. He often wrote about his experiences in World War II and the Spanish Civil War, as well as his family's history. His early books were written in a more traditional way. But with books like Le vent (1957) and L'Herbe (1958), he started to develop a new style of writing called the Nouveau roman.
His book La Route des Flandres (1960) tells stories about wartime. This book won him an important prize and made him known around the world. In Triptyque (1973), he mixed three different stories together without clear breaks. His novels Histoire (1967), Les Géorgiques (1981), and L'Acacia (1989) mostly explore his family's past.
How He Wrote and Who Influenced Him
Claude Simon is often linked to the nouveau roman movement, which included writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet. While his stories sometimes jump around and are not always in order, like in Histoire (1967) and Triptyque (1973), he still kept a strong sense of story and characters.
He was also influenced by older writers like Marcel Proust and William Faulkner. Simon often used very long sentences, sometimes stretching over many pages. This was similar to Proust's style. He also used settings that reminded readers of Proust's work.
You can see Faulkner's influence in Simon's books because they often jump back and forth in time. This can sometimes make the story feel a bit confusing, but it's part of his unique style. He also blended different voices and thoughts into the narrator's words. For example, in L'Acacia (1989), he used dates that were not in order instead of chapter titles, just like Faulkner did in his book The Sound and the Fury.
Main Ideas in His Books
Even with these influences, Simon's writing was very original. War was a very important theme in almost all his books. He often compared how different people experienced different wars in the same novel. For example, he wrote about World War I and World War II in L'Acacia.
Many of his novels also explored family history. He wrote about the stories and myths passed down through generations and how they affected the characters' lives. Also, almost all of Simon's novels feature horses. He was a skilled horse rider himself and even fought in a horse-mounted army unit during World War II. He often wrote about how strange it was to have soldiers on horses fighting in a modern, machine-driven war.
Simon was also very interested in how people experience time. His books often showed images of old age, sometimes seen through the eyes of a child. He wanted to show how people live in history – meaning how they might feel connected to the lives and stories of their ancestors who lived long ago.
Works
- Le Tricheur (The Cheat) 1946
- La Corde Raide (The Tightrope) 1947
- Gulliver 1952
- Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) 1954
- Le vent: Tentative de restitution d 'un rétable baroque (The Wind: Attempted Restoration of a Baroque Altarpiece) 1957
- L'Herbe (The Grass) 1958
- La Route des Flandres (The Flanders Road) 1960
- Le Palace (The Palace) 1962
- La Separation (The Separation) 1963; play, adapted from the novel L'Herbe
- Femmes, sur 23 peintures de Joan Miró (Women, on 23 paintings by Joan Miró) 1966; new edition, La Chevelure de Bérénice (Berenice's Hair) 1984
- Histoire (Story) 1967
- La Bataille de Pharsale (The Battle of Pharsalus) 1969
- Orion aveugle: Essai (Blind Orion: Essay) 1970
- Les Corps conducteurs (Conducting Bodies) 1971
- Triptyque (Triptych) 1973
- Leçon de choses (Lesson in Things) 1975
- Les Géorgiques (The Georgics) 1981
- L'Invitation (The Invitation) 1987
- L'Acacia (The Acacia) 1989
- Le jardin des plantes (The Garden of Plants) 1997
- Le tramway (The Trolley) 2001
Images for kids
-
Jean Ricardou and Claude Simon at a seminar in France.
-
A literature workshop in France in 1980.
_-_Philippe_Binant_Archives.jpg)
See also
In Spanish: Claude Simon para niños
