Bibliofemme News
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10/07/2005
Nobel Laureate Claude Simon dies aged 91
Claude Simon a pioneer of the expermental new novel style of the 1950's and winner of the Noble Prize in Literature in 1985 has died.
Simon died last Wednesday and was buried yesterday in Paris, according to France's Culture Ministry.
The Swedish Academy that awarded Simon the 1985 Nobel Prize in literature cited the novel Les Georgiques ("The Georgics") as perhaps his most important work. The 1981 novel depicts Simon's experience with the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
At the time, he was the first Frenchman to win the Nobel since playwright and author Jean-Paul Sartre was honored with the award but turned it down in 1964.
Simon's intricate, free-flowing style makes his works difficult to read which partly explains why he was not well-known even in France. Some critics have compared his jumbled chronology and abrupt transitions to the techniques of William Faulkner, the American author.
"French literature has lost one of its greatest authors," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said in a statement from his office. "Claude Simon will remain as one of the great novelists of collective and individual memory."
Simon once said of his own work: "I am incapable of making up a story. All I write is taken directly from real life, I only copy reality."
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