FRENCH WRITER WINS NOBEL PRIZE
Author: Associated Press
Date: Friday, October 18, 1985
Page: 14
Section: NATIONAL/FOREIGN
Claude Simon, a novelist whose complex style has kept his work
from becoming well known even in his native France, won the Nobel Prize for
literature yesterday.
Simon, 72, became the 12th French writer to win the award and the first
since 1964, when it was awarded to Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist author
and playwright, who declined to accept the prize.
The Swedish Academy said it had been watching Simon's work ever since he
became known as an exponent in the late 1950s of the French "nouveau roman,"
or "new novel" style, which did away with conventional concepts of narrative
structure plot and character development.
The academy said in its citation that Simon's novels, many of which draw
on his experiences with the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and as a
cavalry officer in World War II, combine "the poet's and the painter's
creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human
condition."
Simon now spends most of his time growing wine grapes on the slopes of the
Pyrenees in Salses in southern France.
His editor, Jerome Lindon of the Editions Minuit publishing company, said
in a telephone interview from Simon's home that "Claude Simon . . . is very
touched by the honor bestowed upon him."
Simon's last major work, and according to the academy secretary, Dr. Lars
Gyllensten, his "most important," was the novel "Les Georgiques," ("The
Georgics"), published in 1981. It depicts his experiences in the Spanish Civil
War.
Simon is descended from a long line of southern France wine producers and
cavalrymen. He was born in 1913 on the east African island of Madagascar, then
a French colony, and grew up in Perpignan in southern France.
Although he began writing in 1945 with "Le Tricheur" ("The Swindler"), his
literary breakthrough did not come until the publication of "Le Vent" ("The
Wind") and "L'herbe" ("The Grass") in 1959 and "La Route Des Flandres" ("The
Road to Flanders") in 1960.
All three novels were written in the "nouveau roman" style, which seeks
not to tell a story but to create a dream-like atmosphere in which seemingly
unrelated incidents are juxtaposed.
His name is unfamiliar even to many French, in contrast to the fame
enjoyed by such previous French Nobel laureates as Sartre and Albert Camus.
Simon has said he was partly inspired by the style of the American
novelist William Faulkner, who won the Nobel Prize in 1949, and France's
Marcel Proust, who never won it.
The prize carries a cash award of 1.8 million Swedish kronor, about
$225,000.
AA0713;10/17,15:42 CORCOR;10/18,14:49 NOBEL18
|
