The Flanders Road
by Claude Simon
Summary
Captain de Reixach is shot from his horse and killed during the collapse of the French army in May 1940, and The Flanders Road circles that single instant from every angle its narrator, a cavalry soldier and cousin of de Reixach named Georges, can reach. Claude Simon builds the novel out of a real historical episode, a French cavalry regiment sent forward against German armored tanks with almost no chance of survival, and Georges spends the whole book, years later, still trying to work out whether de Reixach rode deliberately into the fire that killed him, whether his death was accident, despair, or something closer to a private decision nobody else could see.
The novel refuses to let that question, or almost any other event in it, sit inside a normal chronology. Simon writes in long, looping, deliberately unresolved sentences that move without warning between the moment of de Reixach's death, Georges's later captivity in a German prisoner of war train, and a half remembered episode of adultery connected to de Reixach's household, on the theory that memory itself does not organize experience into tidy, sequential scenes and a novel about memory should not either. The same handful of images, mud, horses, the sound of the road, return again and again across the book, each time altered slightly by the distance of more remembering, until repetition itself becomes the novel's real structure rather than plot.
Reading it means giving up on following events in order and instead following one mind circling an unanswerable question for the length of a whole book, which asks real patience of a reader used to conventional narrative. It suits someone drawn to fiction that treats the collapse of France in 1940 not as a sequence of battles to be recounted but as a wound that keeps reopening every time a survivor tries to describe it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Claude Simon the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature for combining, in his novel, the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition, and The Flanders Road, published in 1960, remains the novel most closely tied to that citation. Simon had served in a French cavalry regiment, was captured by the Germans after the very collapse the novel describes, escaped in October 1940, and later joined the French Resistance, drawing the book directly from his own wartime experience.
Simon had been nominated for the Nobel repeatedly through the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Academy member Artur Lundkvist had publicly argued as early as 1983 that the prize should go to Simon rather than to that year's eventual winner, William Golding. The American critic Roger Shattuck called the 1985 choice a courageous one, praising Simon's effort to extend the relations between language, vision and the novel form, and French president François Mitterrand personally congratulated Simon on the originality of his work.