{"product_id":"the-flanders-road-9781681375953","title":"The Flanders Road","description":"\u003cb\u003eBy the winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature, a riveting, stylistically audacious modernist epic about the French cavalry's bloody face-off against German Panzer tanks during WWII.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eOn a sunny day in May 1940, the French army sent out the cavalry against the invading German army's Panzer tanks. Unsurprisingly, the French were routed. Twenty-six-year-old Claude Simon was among the French forces. As they retreated, he saw his captain shot off his horse by a German sniper. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThis is the primal scene to which Simon returns repeatedly in his fiction and nowhere so powerfully as in his most famous novel \u003ci\u003eThe Flanders Road\u003c\/i\u003e. Here Simon's own memories overlap with those of his central character, Georges, whose captain, a distant relative, dies a similar death. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eGeorges reviews the circumstances and sense--or senselessness--of that death, first in the company of a fellow prisoner in prison camp and then some years later in the course of an ever more erotically charged visit to the captain's widow, Corinne. As he does, other stories emerge: Corrine's prewar affair with the jockey Iglisia, who would become the captain's orderly; the possible suicide of an eighteenth-century ancestor, whose grim portrait loomed large in Georges's childhood home; Georges's learned father, helpless against barbarism among his books. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe great question throughout, the question that must be urgently asked even as it remains unanswerable, is whether fiction can confront and respond to the trauma of history.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e New York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/12\/2022\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781681375953\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 208\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.81lbs","brand":"Claude Simon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42132482949301,"sku":"9781681375953","price":14.41,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/products\/img_62babca6-1810-4fe2-8ea1-dc16cfe8078c.jpg?v=1652813660","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/the-flanders-road-9781681375953","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}