Le Palace Reading Order

Le Palace (The Palace, 1962) by Claude Simon is the novel he wrote immediately after La Route des Flandres and which took him into new territory: instead of the Flemish retreat of 1940, Le Palace places its unnamed narrator in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, in the summer of 1936, as the revolution is at its height and already, imperceptibly, beginning to fail. The narrator revisits the city years later and attempts, through the mediation of a city that has changed and a memory that was never complete, to reconstruct the events of his earlier stay: a meeting with a group of revolutionaries, a murder or assassination that he witnessed or failed to witness, the hotel (the Palace) where the gold of the Republican government was briefly held. The novel's central preoccupation is the gap between the revolutionary ideal and the reality of revolutionary violence and failure — the way the energy of the barricades turns almost immediately into the terror, the purges, and the disillusionment. But Le Palace is also Simon's most intense meditation on the relationship between memory and place: the Barcelona he revisits in the present is the same city and an entirely different place, and the past he is trying to recover was inaccessible even when he was living it. Simon's prose in Le Palace is among his most compressed and demanding — shorter than La Route des Flandres, but denser.