Style, no less than character, event, and story, is subject to both decomposition and recomposition. Georges vacillates in his belief in the power of language to conjure reality. In a debate with his father just before he leaves for active service he blurts out “I just don’t want to go on putting words together and more words and still more words . . . Don’t you ever get tired of it yourself?” But, later, as he trades stories with Blum during their imprisonment, he reevaluates his father’s love of the written word. “And so after all words are at least good for something, so that in his summer house he can probably convince himself that by putting them together in every possible way you can at least sometimes manage with a little luck to tell the truth.” For Simon the sentence is not a stable mode of exposition but an agile tool of exploration. Assertions meet qualifications that generate more assertions that lead to more qualifications, etc. Here time, among its many properties, can advance “without progression.” Qualifiers abound: “or,” “perhaps,” “unless,” “although,” “except perhaps,” “that is to say,” “or better still.” Discovery takes place less by grammatical rule than by the semantic pressures of juxtaposition. Analogy challenges causality. In stunning passage after stunning passage Simon deploys the maximum force of the French language in shape, sound, and meaning. Here the English-language reader is fortunate to be in the hands of the master translator Richard Howard, who renders the full sensorial range of Simon’s style. Simon could have no better advocate in the language of Shakespeare.

Indeed, it is a mark of Simon’s importance that he has been translated into and remains in print in all major world languages and not a few minor ones. The republication of The Flanders Road gives the English-speaking reader an opportunity to discover anew a writer who faced the chaos of human experience with courage and indefatigable artistic resilience.

—JERRY W. CARLSON

THE FLANDERS ROAD

ONE

I thought I was learning how to live, I was learning how to die.

Leonardo da Vinci