HISTOIRE

by Claude Simon ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1968

Histoire is an astonishing tour de force, astonishingly rich, and astonishingly vague. Like L'Herbe (The Grass), another of Simon's sagas of family disintegration, this ambiguously freighted narrative employs the atmospheric resources of the cinema with overwhelming, crushing insistence. The detached, perplexing inner world of the narrator unfolds like some ubiquitous camera, a montage that keeps widening, vanishing, returning in deeper and deeper glimpses, scenes, impressions. The fragmentation of time, the catalogues of possessions, photos, furnishings, the half heard blurred, groping conversations--these are the phenomenological enigmatic artifacts of the nouveau roman and of Histoire. But to what purpose? The characters are sketchy or vaporous, the plot (or plots) no more than a pple in water. We rid ourselves of psychological substance because psychology is limiting or ""subjective."" We want the open sea, the fluidity of life, the texture of pure sensation. Oh yes, things happen: a sweetheart kills herself, a mother dies, the hero suffers disillusionment during the Civil War in Spain, there's seedy decline, matrimonial battles. But these events can scarcely be said to have been rendered in any genuine or compelling way. Rather, they have been observed, ""objectively"" described, neutralized. Simon said somewhere that the only memory is ""the memory of the muscles,"" the strange terrible beauty of the physical ""presence."" In Histoire, be gives us the poetry of physiology, a very daring, unsatisfying achievement.

Pub Date: April 1, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Braziller

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1968

Categories: FICTION