Marlise Simons

PARIS: French writer Claude Simon, who won the 1985 Nobel Prize in literature and is best remembered for his place in the so-called “new novel” movement, died Wednesday, his publisher said Saturday. He was 91. His publishing house, Editions de Minuit, said the author was buried Saturday in Paris. Simon wrote more than a dozen novels, which many readers found challenging because he often ignored literary conventions like narrative structure or plot. His earliest books, like ‘The Swindler,’ ‘The Wind,’ ‘The Grass’ and ‘The Flanders Road,’ sought not so much to tell a story but to weave webs of words and associations that had no apparent relationship but tumbled along, one description leading to the next. In its citation, the Nobel committee said Simon’s work combined “the poet’s and the painter’s creativeness with a deepened

awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition.” Simon’s novels drew on his experiences during the Spanish Civil War and World War II and, after the fall of France, in the Resistance. Although Simon said he had nothing to say, “no important truth of a social, historical or sacred nature” to tell, he kept writing and defending his own disjointed style. He mocked complaints that, as he put them, “I am a difficult, boring, unreadable, confused writer,” and recalled that the same reproaches had “always been leveled at any artist who even to the slightest degree upsets acquired habits and the established order of things.”

“Let us wonder, instead,” he said, “at the way in which the grandchildren of those people who in Impressionist paintings once saw nothing but shapeless . . . daubs, today form endless queues outside exhibitions and museums to admire the works of those same daubers.” ‘The Flanders Road,’ published in 1960, is widely considered Simon’s masterpiece.