Book Review: The Flanders Road by Claude Simon

Posted on by Karissa

Claude Simon was a French writer who wrote several semi-autobiographical works, many of which are inspired by his own experiences in World War Two. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985, which is the reason I picked up a copy of The Flanders Road. After learning that Gabriel Garcia Marquez (one of my favourite writers) was the Nobel winner the year my brother was born, I looked up who won it the year I was born and learned of Simon for the first time.

The Flanders Road is less than 200 pages long and yet it took me months to finish it. The plot is almost non-existent, I struggled to differentiate the characters, and I never figured out the timeline. The book is largely composed of run-on sentences in a sort of stream-of-conscious style.

The main character is probably a young soldier named Georges though by the end of the book I was somewhat convinced all the other characters were segments of his personality. Georges’ captain is a distant relative and Georges witnesses his death in a scene that is played out over and over again in many different ways. There is also a complicated relationship with the captain’s much younger wife and a recurring theme of death and adultery through their shared family tree.

The repetition of that central scene and the frequent focus on horses brought to my mind The Wars by Timothy Findley, which was published after this book. I wouldn’t be surprised if Findley had read Simon’s work.

This is the sort of book that I used to feel like I wasn’t smart enough to get. But as I’ve gotten older and become more confident in my own reading, I’ve decided instead that this is the sort of book that just isn’t for me. There are certainly powerful moments within The Flanders Road and I can see that Simon is working to make a statement about war. I can agree with and notice these things while also seeing that this is not a novel that works for me.

This book was translated from the French by Richard Howard

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Published by Karissa

9 thoughts on “Book Review: The Flanders Road by Claude Simon”

  1. I’m not gonna lie, books like this just straight up sound stupid and pretentious to me. If you’re reading level is capable of following along with the target audience of the author, and you still don’t get it, that’s a “him” problem, not a you problem. Unless we’re talking Gertrude Stein, cuz she thinks its an “us” problem and not a “her” problem.

    1. I’m inclined to agree with you. I used to be embarrassed to admit I didn’t “get” books like this because I thought it meant I wasn’t a smart reader. Nowadays I feel confident enough in my self as a reader to say this book might have an audience but it isn’t me. With a book this difficult to read, I think the audience is probably pretty small and I’m not sure who I would recommend it to.

    2. I won’t even say it’s just not for me. I get on a tear and start saying that some people read this stuff because they think it elevates them to pipe-smoking, patches-on-elbows professors to “get” what the peons don’t. But I may be judgmental after years of reading experimental stuff that is purposefully confusing (as confessed by some authors!) and then called art.

    3. I’m less sympathetic when first time writers do this sort of thing. I think you have to earn writing like this – you can’t just start here and say you’re writing in a confusing manner deliberately. You have to show that you can write to start!

    4. I’m also sympathetic with first time writers. I loved the incredibly confusing, weird, yet horrifying novel Pontypool (which was later made into a radio play, I believe, and a film, all in Canada). The writer admits he penned that novel when he was, like, a 23-year-old arrogant dude who thought he was going to change the face of books and was basically a douche (pardon my language) at that time.

    5. Any artist (or person really) who is willing to acknowledge their own past faults and learn and grow from them is doing ok, in my book.

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