The Wind

This is the sort of experimental novel that you can recommend to others only at your own peril. By way of illustrating my point, I will now quote one of the shorter sentences from "The Wind" (tr. Richard Howard): "I remember how the wind blew almost continuously for three months, so that when it did stop (a few hours or a few days--but never more than two or three) you thought you could still hear it, wild and wailing, not outdoors but somehow inside your own head: voices emptied of meaning, nothing but noise and, so it seemed, dust--the dust that penetrated everywhere, insinuated itself under your burning eyelids, in your mouth, communicating its taste to the things you ate, interposing between the skin of your fingertips and what they took hold of (papers left on the desk the day before, plates, napkins) that haunting, imperceptible, granular film." Still with me? "The Wind" is a lovely 254 page prose-poem, a long, sad sigh of a book. There is a story here--it deals with the pitful, tragic life of one Antoine Montes--but narrative is secondary to Simon's lyrical stream-of-consciousness prose, which at its best achieves an elemental beauty you seldom find in fiction. The appeal of this book is sensuous, not intellectual; you need not even have to follow the serpentine storyline to appreciate this novel. Parts of it can be frustratingly mystifying, but it isn't terribly difficult to read once you have become accustomed to Simon's lush prose. It really is a beautiful book. For those who keep track of these things, Claude Simon won the 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature.