The Trolley - Softcover

Simon, Claude

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565848578 ISBN 13: 9781565848573

Publisher: The New Press, 2004

Synopsis

Claude Simon, a Nobel Prize–winning author and cultural icon in France, has written a Proustian novel, intermingling the memories of youth and old age. His madeleine is the trolley of the book’s title, the transport that took him to and from school every morning of his childhood. Passing back and forth between vine-covered hills, the trolley punctuates the trivial or cruel events of many lives, while action unfolds at the shore, in the gradually modernizing town, on a tennis court, and in a country villa. Elsewhere, life in all its fragility persists in the pavilions and labyrinthine corridors of a hospital, where our narrator now travels on a wheeled hospital bed, set to begin a new voyage into old age. When coincidences unite the two trajectories, the story becomes a fugue of memory that has delighted critics and made the book an immediate bestseller in France.

About this title

Review:

Proust himself seldom did it better. A small but substantial masterpiece from one of the world's greatest living writers.

Synopsis:

At the age of 88, Claude Simon, Nobel Prize-winning author and cultural icon of France, has written a Proustian novel, intermingling the memories of youth and of old age. His "madeleine" is the trolley of the book's title, the transport that took him to and from his school every morning of his childhood. Through detailed descriptions, the reader is magically drawn into Simon's childhood with its promises and dangers. As the book progresses, the narrative moves from childhood into old age and Simon moves to a different form of transport, a mobile hospital bed, beginning a different voyage into old age.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1565848578
• ISBN 13: 9781565848573
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112