Reading Order
La Route des FlandresLa Route des Flandres Reading Order
La Route des Flandres (The Flanders Road, 1960) by Claude Simon is the masterpiece of the nouveau roman — a novel about the military disaster of May 1940 (the German breakthrough at Sedan and the collapse of the French army) narrated by Georges, a cavalry officer who witnesses the death of his captain de Reixach, from a prison camp after the war in a series of overlapping, spiraling memories that refuse to settle into chronological order. Simon won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985, and La Route des Flandres is the novel most frequently cited in that recognition. The prose is Faulknerian in its sustained sentences, its multiple temporal planes held simultaneously in a single sentence, and its refusal of conventional punctuation — Simon acknowledged Faulkner as his most important model. The subject is simultaneously the military disaster (the specific defeat of the French cavalry), the problem of memory and testimony (can the disaster be narrated? can any extreme experience be communicated?), and the question of what happened between de Reixach and his wife Corinne — whose existence before and after the battle becomes the obsessive mystery of the narration.
Where to start
La Route des Flandres requires patient reading — Simon's long sentences and multiple temporal planes need to be followed carefully rather than skimmed. Begin by accepting that the chronology will not be linear and that the relationships between the different time-layers will become clearer as the novel progresses. Read L'Acacia (1989) after — Simon's later autobiographical novel covering the same historical material gives a different approach to the same events. Read Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury first if you have not — Simon's formal debt to Faulkner is real and important.
Complete La Route des Flandres Book List
- 1Buy
La Route des Flandres
Claude Simon·1960·Start here — patient reading required; the multiple temporal planes clarify as you proceed; the masterpiece - 2Buy
L'Herbe
Claude Simon·1958·The immediate predecessor — a dying old woman and a summer in Provence; the formal transition to La Route des Flandres - 3Buy
L'Acacia
Claude Simon·1989·The late autobiographical novel — the same WWI and WWII family history in a different formal approach; read after La Route des Flandres - 4Buy
La Palace
Claude Simon·1962·The Palace — the Spanish Civil War setting; the immediate successor to La Route des Flandres; more elliptical, more extreme - 5Buy
Les Géorgiques
Claude Simon·1981·The late major novel — three time periods (Napoleonic, Spanish Civil War, WWII) in a monumental synthesis; read after establishing the Simon style in La Route des Flandres
La Route des Flandres — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the May 1940 disaster that La Route des Flandres describes?
The disaster is the German breakthrough at Sedan in May 1940 that led to the rapid collapse of the French army and the surrender of France six weeks later. The French cavalry regiments — equipped with horses, trained for a previous war — were destroyed almost immediately when German armor and air power made their kind of fighting obsolete. Simon himself served in a cavalry regiment and was captured; the experience is the direct basis for Georges's narration. The defeat is presented not as a military failure but as a kind of ontological catastrophe — the end of a world, the revelation that the world the French army was equipped to fight in had ceased to exist.
Why does Georges obsess over Corinne?
Corinne is the wife of Captain de Reixach, who dies at the head of the column in what might be suicide (de Reixach raises himself up on his horse in a movement that exposes him to the German fire) or might be a random death. Georges's obsession with Corinne — with what happened in her marriage to de Reixach, with whether she was unfaithful, with what de Reixach saw or knew — is the novel's central mystery. The obsession is erotic and interpretive simultaneously: understanding Corinne would mean understanding de Reixach's death, which would mean understanding what happened to the French army and to history. But the mystery remains unresolvable, as the disaster itself remains uncomprehended.
What is Simon's debt to Faulkner?
Claude Simon acknowledged William Faulkner as his most important literary model, and the influence is visible on every page of La Route des Flandres: the sustained sentences that hold multiple temporal planes simultaneously, the refusal of conventional chronological narration, the use of multiple narrators or a single narrating consciousness that moves through time non-linearly, and the treatment of the past as a perpetual presence rather than a completed event. The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) are the Faulkner texts most relevant to Simon; reading Simon's Nobel lecture (1985) gives his own account of the Faulkner influence and his departures from it.
What is the Nobel Prize citation for Claude Simon?
The Nobel Committee awarded Claude Simon the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985 'who in his novel combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition.' The citation is unusually brief and somewhat vague — it does not name any specific work. The award was generally understood as recognition of La Route des Flandres as the major achievement, though Simon's defenders also argued for Les Géorgiques (1981) as his greatest work. The Nobel was controversial in France, where many critics still regarded the nouveau roman as an academic exercise rather than a genuine literary achievement.
How does La Route des Flandres relate to other WWII French novels?
La Route des Flandres is the most formally experimental French novel of the May 1940 disaster. Its near-contemporaries include Le Silence de la mer (Vercors, 1942), La Condition humaine (Malraux, 1933, about a different defeat), and Sartre's unfinished Les Chemins de la liberté (1945–1949). But the comparison with Robert Merle's Week-end à Zuydcoote (1949, about the Dunkirk evacuation) and Jean Giono's Un Roi sans divertissement (1947) gives the most illuminating picture of how different literary approaches to the same historical catastrophe produce completely different novels. Simon's is the most formally extreme and the most epistemologically pessimistic about the possibility of narrating catastrophe.
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