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.