The granting of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1985 to Claude Simon brought worldwide attention to an author whose unique blend of postmodernist, vividly sensorial, and broadly historical writing had already won him the recognition of many readers for at least three decades. Explaining their choice, the Nobel Academy praised Simon for having combined the creativity of the poet and the painter and expressed a profound sense of time and the human condition. That expression, bearing on the most basic feelings of love, sorrow, passion, and pain, is the common thread linking the diverse stages in Simon's development as a novelist.

Simon is perhaps best known in connection with the group of writers, labeled the New Novelists, whose works have been published by the Editions de Minuit, under the direction of Jérôme Lindon. Like others in that group and modernists such as James Joyce...