The wind (Simon)

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The Wind ( French: Le Vent ) is a novel by the French Nobel Prize winner for literature Claude Simon from 1957.

The "devilish", "eternal", "eternally living" wind - constantly blowing through the novel - can be seen as the secret protagonist. Pine trees are bent by the wind and the leaves of the trees rustle like paper in the night wind ...

In 1960, Claude Simon informed the reader of his intention to write - concerning the almost impenetrable processes in the novel: he tried to “translate impressions of the diverse reality in the text into duration, into time”.

content

The 35-year-old, ailing, orphaned photographer Antoine Montès from the northern French town of Eragny on the “ Aube or Yonne ” spends the summer in an old town in the south of France. Antoine looks like a fifty year old. The reason for the eight hundred kilometer journey to the windy south is the death of his father.

The long-established notary who deals with the inheritance issue advises the heir to sell the inheritance. This is a two hundred hectare vineyard - nine kilometers from the old city. The increasingly penniless, shabbily dressed Antoine does not accept the sales offer and dismisses the manager of the winery - as a northern French photographer inexperienced in viticulture. The dismissed person litigates against the breach of contract. Antoine waits six months for the trial on site while walking with the camera under palm trees.

The father had previously met Antoine's mother in northern France, taken her to his home in the south, got pregnant, married and cheated on her before Antoine's birth. The pregnant woman - mortally offended - had never to be seen again in her northern French homeland and had made no claims to the child's father. There was never a divorce.

While waiting, Antoine gets closer to the vulgar serving girl Rosa under the thick, dark leaves of a plane tree. The woman, around thirty, has two daughters - Theresa and her little, unnamed sister.

A young girl, probably Helene, unsuccessfully approaches the new vineyard owner on behalf of her father. Helene is the sister of a certain Cécile. This virgin, mentioned for the first time at the end of the ninth of the seventeen chapters, makes her actual appearance at the end of the novel with a bang: Cécile seduces Antoine.

Rosa is murdered under mysterious circumstances together with her life partner, the gypsy. Antoine, who cannot cloud a little water, is of course not one of the suspects in the eyes of the police. The dead had dealt with thieves during their lifetime, who reportedly prevented their crime from being reported to the police.

Only when Rosa is dead does Antoine feel love for the deceased. The photographer tries in vain to obtain custody of Rosa's two daughters. But he is allowed to visit her once a month in the orphanage. The children are eventually taken away without Antoine's knowledge. Nobody from the orphanage reveals the girls' new whereabouts.

Antoine loses the process and is forced to sell the vineyard.

Quote

  • "Maybe time itself didn't have time."

shape

The first-person narrator, a high school teacher resident at the scene, had met Antoine in a photo shop. The teacher later had Antoine tell him something. His text - the present novel - is therefore an extremely incomplete attempt at reconstructing what happened. The narrator always doubts its correctness. The teacher tells about Antoine in the third person. In the picture painted by the teacher - puzzling back and forth - Antoine appears as a hesitant fool. In most cases, Antoine cancels his statement verbatim after the first half of the sentence at the latest. The stupid thing about Antoine shines through in countless passages in the text - for example particularly unmistakably when Cécile forces him to have sex.

According to Burmeister, the readership must have reacted with incomprehension. Because the author replied to "irritated readers" who are said to have had trouble reading the "confused", "excessive" and "incomplete" reading.

Classification in the work of the author

After its publication, the novel was assigned to the nouveau roman by literary studies according to its form .

reception

  • According to Serge Doubrovsky , the author undertakes efforts to parallelize “the hopeless disorder of experience and the artificial order of language”.
  • Burmeister has discussed the novel: Sometimes the narrating teacher broods over Antoine's story and sometimes the boundaries between the narrating I and the described he become blurred. The novel could also be read as the story of Antoine's six-month defeat. This decline is a symbol of the unsuitability of reason in describing interpersonal relationships.

literature

Used edition

  • The wind. Attempt to restore a baroque altar. Novel. Translated from the French by Eva Rechel-Mertens . Afterword by Brigitte Burmeister. Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, Leipzig 1988, ISBN 3-378-00265-4 . (Gustav Kiepenheuer Bücherei 82) (Licensor: R. Piper, Munich 1959)

Secondary literature

Remarks

  1. ^ Probably Perpignan (Burmeister, p. 30, 9th Zvu).
  2. ↑ A few examples of the incomplete character that dominates the novel: Antoine is attacked by a stranger because the dead father is said to have dishonored the attacker's daughter during his lifetime (edition used, p. 40 above). Apart from this fact nothing is communicated. The love story with pink has to be guessed at and cannot be read. In the relevant scene on the bench under the plane tree (edition used, pp. 103–111) it emerges that Rosa lives with a man, a seedy existence. The image of this evidently criminal, whom Rosa detests, initially remains in a vague namelessness. Is it the boxer? Is it the gypsy? Is the gypsy the boxer? Is Antoine getting beaten up by the boxer? There is no real story for that either. However, it turns out much later that Rosa's life partner was the gypsy. There is talk of a dinner to which Antoine was invited by his uncle. This apparently promising thread is - as usual - dropped.
  3. ↑ An altar does appear once in the text (edition used, pp. 217–218), but the subtitle is probably a symbol of the first-person narrator's attempt at fragmentary reconstruction (Burmeister, p. 30, 6. Zvo).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Edition used, p. 4, 9. Zvu
  2. ↑ Burmeister, p. 32, 5th Zvu
  3. ↑ Burmeister, p. 30, 17. Zvo
  4. ↑ Claude Simon - from an interview, quoted in Burmeister, p. 33, 5th Zvu
  5. ↑ French Éragny (edition used, p. 23, 13. Zvu)
  6. ↑ Edition used, p. 265, 10. Zvu and p. 266, 22. Zvo
  7. ↑ Edition used, p. 48, 8th Zvu
  8. ↑ Edition used, p. 202, 4th Zvu
  9. ↑ see for example the edition used, p. 45, 13. Zvu
  10. ↑ Edition used, p. 250 middle - 254
  11. ↑ Burmeister, p. 33, 9th Zvu
  12. ↑ Burmeister in the afterword of the edition used, p. 275 below
  13. ↑ Serge Doubrovsky from 1980, quoted in Burmeister, p. 33, 1. Zvu
  14. ↑ Burmeister, pp. 30–34 above and afterword of the edition used, pp. 270–279.
  15. ↑ Burmeister, p. 31, 12. Zvu
  16. ↑ Burmeister, p. 32, 4. Zvo