The Flanders Road
Cover
Biographical Notes
CLAUDE SIMON (1913–2005) was born in Madagascar and, after his father was killed in the First World War, raised by his mother in southwestern France. He briefly attended Oxford and Cambridge, studied painting under André Lhote in Paris, and traveled to Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution of 1936. When the Second World War broke out, he fought in the French cavalry, was taken prisoner by the Germans shortly after the Battle of Sedan, and later, back in France, joined the Resistance. These wartime experiences informed many of his novels, including The Acacia, The Georgics, and The Flanders Road. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985.
RICHARD HOWARD is the author of eighteen volumes of poetry and has published more than one hundred fifty translations from the French, including, for New York Review Books, Marc Fumaroli’s When the World Spoke French, Honoré de Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece, Julien Gracq’s Balcony in the Forest, and Guy de Maupassant’s Alien Hearts. A collection of his poems, Richard Howard Loves Henry James and Other American Writers, is published in the NYRB Poets Series. He has received a National Book Award for his translation of Les Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, a collection of poetry.
JERRY W. CARLSON is a professor of literature and film at The City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. As an independent producer, he worked with Claude Simon on a proposed film version of The Flanders Road.
Title Page
THE FLANDERS ROAD
CLAUDE SIMON
Translated from the French by
RICHARD HOWARD
Introduction by
JERRY W. CARLSON
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Copyright
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
Copyright © 1960 by Les Éditions de Minuit
Translation copyright © 1961, 1985 by George Braziller
Introduction copyright © 2022 by Jerry W. Carlson
First published in French as La Route des Flandres in 1960.
First published in Great Britain in 1962 by Jonathan Cape Limited.
First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2022.
Cover image: Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), c. 1896–1908; Cleveland Museum of Art
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Simon, Claude, author. | Howard, Richard, 1929– translator. | Carlson, Jerry W., writer of introduction.
Title: The Flanders road / by Claude Simon; translated by Richard Howard; introduction by Jerry Carlson.
Other titles: Route des Flandres. English
Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2021] | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2021000489 (print) | LCCN 2021000490 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681375953 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681375960 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PQ2637.I547 R613 2021 (print) | LCC PQ2637.I547 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914—dc23
ISBN 978-1-68137-596-0
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