Claude Simon

This collection of essays celebrates the work of the French Nobel prize-winning novelist Claude Simon. Scholars reconsider the fifty years of Simon’s fiction in the light of his large-scale autobiographical novel, ‘Le Jardin des Plantes’ (1997). From a variety of perspectives – postmodernist, psychoanalytic, aesthetic – chapters reflect on the central paradox of Simon’s work: his writing and rewriting of an experience of war so disruptive and traumatic that words can never be adequate to communicate it.