- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press; Translated edition (Nov 7 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0810117231
- ISBN-13: 978-0810117235
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.5 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 522 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,033,971 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
To those old enough to remember the "new novel" movement that came out of France in the '60s and early '70s, the name Claude Simon like that of Alain Robbe-Grillet will be familiar. Simon won the Nobel in 1985, some years after the nouveau roman's coldly cinematic yet engagingly torturous life had ended, and 25 years after the publication of Simon's masterwork, The Flanders Road. Simon has always been a "writer's writer," a man of letters in the literal as well as the idiomatic sense, questioning language's utility as he employs it to breathtaking effect. His language is incandescent; his sentiment often ice-cold. Simon's latest autobiographical epic is inscrutable, self-involved, cerebral; but how to criticize a writer for the very qualities that made him famous? The emphasis, as always, is on Simon's experiences in the Spanish Civil War. But here, more than ever, form is a free-for-all. Punctuation, linearity, paragraph breaks: all out the window. Even Joyce's Ulysses had one paragraph follow rather than shove aside, or collide with another. It's as if the disjunctions of e.e. cummings had been visited upon the tender madeleines of Proust with Nabokov's self-indulgence, to baffling effect. Some memorable moments: the comparison of Picasso to a rabbit ("the flattened nose"); the expression of civility in wartime ("General, I must inform you that I've lost my arm"). The average reader will find this novel tedious and insufferable; cConnoisseurs of experimentation and lovers of puzzles and epics will find it endlessly satisfying. Readers who fall somewhere in the middle will want it on their shelf, but whether they will ever want to read it is another matter.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
"Simon's novel is eminently modern, inaugurating as it does links between incommensurable experiences, histories, landscapes, and voices. His writing engages readers in ways of seeing the present by displaying the richness and diversity of its links to the past. Jordan Stump's excellent and deft translation gives readers a privileged access to Simon's inventive work of linking incommensurable worlds." --Maria Minich Brewer, University of Minnesota
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
the discrete pleasures of Claude Simon,
By A Customer
This review is from: Jardin des Plantes: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is a beautiful book: beautifully written, beautifully translated, beautifully presented. And a delight to own, to read, to recommend. Too much is made of how difficult a writer Claude Simon is, especially for readers accustomed to a diet of all that drivel, the emotional manipulation, which passes for literature in our time. This is the real thing and accessible to everyone. A book full of innumerable moments of astonishing prose and insight and experience. A book about war, love, art, memory, reality, fiction, but mostly a book about the writing, which is always as it should be. And if at any stage you need to reread a sentence to grasp its glory then you will only find the pleasure enhanced. Do not be deterred.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews) 13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Most accessible Simon, a great book,
By Mickey Shipwreck - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Jardin des Plantes: A Novel (Hardcover)
"Jardin Des Plantes" is a complex novel, but to me is the most accessible of all of Simon's works. This is an excellent translation, an eminently readable text.This novel has been a touchstone for other writers such as W.G. Sebald, and it's the structural antecedent for Mike Figgis' film "Timecode." If you're a bit abashed by Simon's notorious difficulty, check out his Nobel prize address (easily found on the web), a wide-ranging humane account of a lifetime of writing and reading. It concludes thus: "Nothing is sure, nor does it [the path the writer takes] offer any other guarantees than those Flaubert, following Novalis, speaks of: a harmony, a music. Searching for it, the writer makes only laborious progress. Feeling his way forward like a blind man, he goes up culs-de-sac, gets bogged down and starts out anew. If we at all costs must find some edification in his efforts, one could say it lies in seeing that always we are advancing across sands which shift under our feet." 11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
the discrete pleasures of Claude Simon,
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Jardin des Plantes: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is a beautiful book: beautifully written, beautifully translated, beautifully presented. And a delight to own, to read, to recommend. Too much is made of how difficult a writer Claude Simon is, especially for readers accustomed to a diet of all that drivel, the emotional manipulation, which passes for literature in our time. This is the real thing and accessible to everyone. A book full of innumerable moments of astonishing prose and insight and experience. A book about war, love, art, memory, reality, fiction, but mostly a book about the writing, which is always as it should be. And if at any stage you need to reread a sentence to grasp its glory then you will only find the pleasure enhanced. Do not be deterred.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
"The average reader will find this novel tedious and insufferable"...,
By Customer Formerly Known as Giordano Bruno - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Jardin des Plantes: A Novel (Hardcover)
... says the defensive reviewer for Publishers Weekly, quoted here on Amazon. I like to suppose that I'm a more-than-average reader, at least in terms of grit and perseverance, but I tossed this tedious exercise in self-referential obscurantism after some twenty pages. It reeks of the kind of literary pomposity that saturates the Journal of the Modern Language Association. It's a title to flash at English department cocktail parties at universities in state capitals. And just for a point of reference, I've read Pale Fire, Ulysses, Nobodaddy's Children, A Personal Matter, and other 'difficult' novels. Nobel Prize or not, Claude Simon is no Nabokov.
|
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
