World War Two began on September 1, 1939, as Germany surged with annihilating force into Poland. France and Great Britain declared war against Germany two days later, which was followed by eight months of light military action—the so-called Phoney War. Only on May 10, 1940, did the feared blitzkrieg of the German panzer divisions come. France and the Low Countries collapsed like tents in a hurricane. Paris, open and undefended, was occupied on June 14.

Among the French forces pitted against the German tanks at the Belgian border were troops of traditional cavalrymen, men on horses facing armored killing machines. Among those unfortunate French soldiers was Claude Simon, a twenty-six-year-old sometime painter and aspiring novelist, the son of an officer killed in the first days of World War One. Simon was one of only four members of his squadron to survive, after seeing his commanding officer cut down by a machine gun in an ambush. Captured by the Germans, he escaped and made his way back to his family home in the south of France. What he could not escape, however, were his memories of the violence and chaos and terror of combat and military collapse and of his wanderings afterward in search of what he would later call “the front that no longer existed.” These were experiences that he could not forget even as he felt they defied description. Fragmentary Description of a Disaster was the preliminary title of the novel drawing upon these experiences that in 1960 would be published to acclaim as The Flanders Road.

Fractured form and fragmentary memory both raise the problem of description. For Simon, the tool kit of the realist novel proved useless. In his skepticism about the epistemological claims of realism, he is frequently grouped with fellow French writers Michel Butor, Jean Ricardou, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute, among others, under the banner of the nouveau roman (new novel). As a grouping, it was more useful for marketing then than it is now for aesthetic accuracy. To be sure, Simon shares with these writers a distrust of engaged literature with “its realist alibi” and their embrace of the radical inadequacy of narrative and language for understanding human experience. Even so, Simon can never hide in formalism because he can never let go of the mystery of history and the problems of approaching what he calls the “magma” of experience. Explaining his boredom with the realist novel, he admits that his own work is “practically autobiographical” because “reality is far superior to fiction.” Simon’s affinities align with those of Marcel Proust and William Faulkner, the two modernist writers whom he saw as his masters, both of whom found infinite inspiration in their immediate environments. Their questions about time, history, narration, language, characterization, the status of the author, and the expressive powers of the nonliterary arts are his questions. Their baroque density of design and language is also his.