Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Flanders Road

The Flanders Road

Simon, Claude
Howard, Richard
Carlson, Jerry W.

Paperback

General FictionHistorical Fiction

Publisher Price: $16.95

ISBN10: 1681375958
ISBN13: 9781681375953
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Jul 12 2022
Pages: 208
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.10 Depth: 7.70
Language: English
By the winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature, a riveting, stylistically audacious modernist epic about the French cavalry's bloody face-off against German Panzer tanks during WWII.

On a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army's panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was among the French forces. As they retreated, he saw his captain shot off his horse by a German sniper.

This is the primal scene to which Simon returns repeatedly in his fiction and nowhere so powerfully as in his most famous novel The Flanders Road. Here Simon's own memories overlap with those of his central character, Georges, whose captain, a distant relative, dies a similar death.

Georges reviews the circumstances and sense--or senselessness--of that death, first in the company of a fellow prisoner in a POW camp and then some years later in the course of an ever more erotically charged visit to the captain's widow, Corinne.

As he does, other stories emerge: Corinne's prewar affair with the jockey Iglésia, who would become the captain's orderly; the possible suicide of an eighteenth-century ancestor, whose grim portrait loomed large in Georges's childhood home; Georges's learned father, whose books are no help against barbarism.

The great question throughout, the question that must be urgently asked even as it remains unanswerable, is whether fiction can confront and respond to the trauma of history.

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