The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Jardin des Plantes by Claude Simon. Trans. and intro. Jordan StumpValerie Orlando
Claude Simon. The Jardin des Plantes. Trans. and intro. Jordan Stump. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001. 288 pp. $29.95.
In the style of the French nouveau roman, Claude Simon’s 1997 book, The Jardin des Plantes, makes its debut in English. Told as a fragmented retrospective, this critically acclaimed author melds both past and present, autobiography and fiction in a haunting narrative centered around the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and the catastrophic engagement of the French and German armies in the early days of World War II (confrontations in which the author was personally engaged). At the age of 87, winner of the 1985 Nobel Prize for Literature, Claude Simon has reached the summit of his productive career. His novel is a testament to a life’s work and a memoir of a century of upheaval, turmoil and despair, and leaves us torn between hating and loving the words on the page. As if to willfully reconstruct the deconstructed, abject world of war in the 20th century, Simon’s stor(ies) not only are told through fragmented memories, they are placed as pieces of a puzzle on the page. The text is physically disjointed, often written on the page as two separate columns, each containing a separate story, or as multiple bits of paragraphs with no beginning or end. Although difficult to read at times, the reader remains engaged as the narrative oscillates between the glory of cavalry infantrymen and the heinous, bloody destruction of tanks, bombs, guns and ammunition. “Will man ever learn to avoid self-destruction?” seems to be Simon’s question. Made uncomfortable by the fragmented style, searching to find closure to horrendous stories of torture, war and despair, we are left fatigued at the end of the novel. In The Jardin des Plantes Claude Simon takes us to another realm of reality by showing us the complexity and the chaos that make up the human condition. [Valerie Orlando]