Summary of The Flanders Road
During the Battle of France in May 1940, Georges witnesses his cavalry squadron being wiped out and his commanding officer and aristocratic relative, Captain de Reixach, being shot by a German soldier. Georges is one of the few survivors and is taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. After the war, he meets Reixach’s young widow, Corinne, in Toulouse. Georges has long fantasised about her and remains preoccupied with her alleged affair with Iglesia, Reixach’s jockey and later one of Georges’s fellow soldiers—an affair that Corinne denies. He keeps wondering whether Reixach deliberately exposed himself to enemy fire because he could not bear his wife’s supposed betrayal.
Reasons to read The Flanders Road
The Flanders Road explores the effects of war and violence on those who experience them, the collapse of the old social order in the face of modern warfare, and the unreliable nature of memory. Largely inspired by Simon’s own experiences in the French army during the Second World War, it is a richly layered novel written in a modernist, fragmentary, stream-of-consciousness style. Though not an easy book, it is widely regarded as one of the most powerful portrayals of the chaos of modern warfare. Claude Simon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985. He is closely associated with the Nouveau Roman, a group of French writers who experimented with narrative form and style during the 1950s and 1960s. He also won the Prix Médicis in 1967 for his novel Histoire.
Setting: Northern France
The wartime episodes take place in northern France, close to the Belgian border. Beugnies, where Simon’s own cavalry unit suffered devastating losses in May 1940, is a plausible real-life location. Later episodes are set in a German prisoner-of-war camp in Saxony and in Toulouse in southern France.
Original title: La route des Flandres
Year of publication: 1960
Nr of pages: 208
