French Nobel Novelist Dies
Claude Simon, the best known of the nouveau roman (new novel) writers in France, characterized by stream of consciousness prose, interior monologues, and lack of punctuation, died last week in Paris, reports Agence France-Presse. He was 91.
In 1985 Simon was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. "Claude Simon's narrative art may appear as a representation of something that lives within us whether we will or not, whether we understand it or not, whether we believe it or not - something hopeful, in spite of all cruelty and absurdity which for that matter seem to characterize our condition and which is so perceptively, penetratingly and abundantly reproduced in his novels," announced the academy.
Simon's best known novel, and the one he called a turning point in his career, is Le Vent (The Wind).