The Flanders Road
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9781681375953
Paperback|9781681375953
✨ Featured Offer
Used, Like New
$14.99
List Price: $16.95
🚚
See all 5 offers from $13.92 FREE standard delivery by: 04 Apr 2026
Overview
By the winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature, a riveting, stylistically audacious modernist epic about the French cavalry's bloody face-off against German Panzer tanks during WWII.
On a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army's panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was among the French forces. As they retreated, he saw his captain shot off his horse by a German sniper.
This is the primal scene to which Simon returns repeatedly in his fiction and nowhere so powerfully as in his most famous novel The Flanders Road. Here Simon's own memories overlap with those of his central character, Georges, whose captain, a distant relative, dies a similar death.
Georges reviews the circumstances and sense--or senselessness--of that death, first in the company of a fellow prisoner in a POW camp and then some years later in the course of an ever more erotically charged visit to the captain's widow, Corinne.
As he does, other stories emerge: Corinne's prewar affair with the jockey Iglésia, who would become the captain's orderly; the possible suicide of an eighteenth-century ancestor, whose grim portrait loomed large in Georges's childhood home; Georges's learned father, whose books are no help against barbarism.
The great question throughout, the question that must be urgently asked even as it remains unanswerable, is whether fiction can confront and respond to the trauma of history.
On a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army's panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was among the French forces. As they retreated, he saw his captain shot off his horse by a German sniper.
This is the primal scene to which Simon returns repeatedly in his fiction and nowhere so powerfully as in his most famous novel The Flanders Road. Here Simon's own memories overlap with those of his central character, Georges, whose captain, a distant relative, dies a similar death.
Georges reviews the circumstances and sense--or senselessness--of that death, first in the company of a fellow prisoner in a POW camp and then some years later in the course of an ever more erotically charged visit to the captain's widow, Corinne.
As he does, other stories emerge: Corinne's prewar affair with the jockey Iglésia, who would become the captain's orderly; the possible suicide of an eighteenth-century ancestor, whose grim portrait loomed large in Georges's childhood home; Georges's learned father, whose books are no help against barbarism.
The great question throughout, the question that must be urgently asked even as it remains unanswerable, is whether fiction can confront and respond to the trauma of history.
| ISBN-13 | 9781681375953 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 1681375958 |
| Weight | 0.54 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 5.24 x 0.61 x 7.97 In |
| List Price | $16.95 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Pages | 208 pages |
| Publisher | NYRB Classics |
| Published On | 2022-07-12 |
View All Offers
Sort by:
Price
Condition
Seller
Seller Comments
Price
Used, Very Good
Seller details
EdmondDantes Bookseller
Minneapolis, MN, USA
pp. 208. Trade Paperback with only minor shelf-wear; book is clean, unmarked. In stock. Ships from M...
Free delivery by: 04 Apr 2026
Used, Very Good
Seller details
HPB-Emerald
Dallas, TX, USA
Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and ...
Free delivery by: 04 Apr 2026
✨ Used, Like New
Seller details
Bedrock Books & Art
Helena, MT, USA
Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 208 p. Audience: General/trade.
Free delivery by: 04 Apr 2026
Used, Like New
Seller details
Magers and Quinn Booksellers
Minneapolis, MN, USA
May have light shelf wear and/or a remainder mark. Complete. Clean pages.
Free delivery by: 04 Apr 2026
Used, Like New
Seller details
GreatBookPrices-
Columbia, MD, USA
100% Money Back Guarantee. Brand New, Perfect Condition. We offer expedited shipping to all US locat...
Free delivery by: 04 Apr 2026