The Trolley - Softcover

Simon, Claude

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565848578 ISBN 13: 9781565848573

Publisher: The New Press, 2004

Synopsis

Claude Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning author and cultural icon in France, has written a Proustian novel, intermingling the memories of youth and old age. His madeleine is the trolley of the book’s title, the transport that took him to and from school every morning of his childhood. Passing back and forth between vine-covered hills, the trolley punctuates the trivial or cruel events of many lives, while action unfolds at the shore, in the gradually modernizing town, on a tennis court, and in a country villa. Elsewhere, life in all its fragility persists in the pavilions and labyrinthine corridors of a hospital, where our narrator now travels on a wheeled hospital bed, set to begin a new voyage into old age. When coincidences unite the two trajectories, the story becomes a fugue of memory that has delighted critics and made the book an immediate bestseller in France.

About this title

About the Author

Claude Simon, an innovator of the French nouveau roman, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1985. He is the author of more than fifteen novels, which draw from his experiences as a cavalryman in the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Resistance. He lives in France.

From Publishers Weekly

Reaching gracefully into the past, the 88-year-old Simon uses the trolley he rode during his childhood as a means to combine memories from his youth with observations stemming from his current status as a Nobel Prize winner and a cultural icon in his native France. Forgoing the normal restrictions of plot, Simon makes his way from one memory to the next, connecting images and characters with sweeping, elegiac prose as he recalls his mother and various relatives, some of the schoolboys who rode the trolley with him and other fellow passengers. He also explores the history of the trolley in a series of elegant descriptions, using brief episodes from the vehicle's history to augment his personal experiences. Simon's thoughts on the restrictions of aging as well as some wartime memories begin to creep in as the book progresses, and the author's command remains so formidable that he surrounds many of his subjects and themes rather than coming at them head on. This book, beautifully translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Howard (who has also translated seven of Simon's previous novels), finds the author working from a palette of words, images and memories to create a unique, vivid world echoing the works of Proust. Simon, a former cavalryman in the Spanish Civil War who also fought in the Resistance and WWII, has built an estimable body of work during his luminous career, and the literary gifts that led to his success remain on display in this well-crafted, insightful novel.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1565848578
• ISBN 13: 9781565848573
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112