Word: simon
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...GRASS (216 pp.)-Claude Simon, translated by Richard Howard-Braziller...
...best, and one of the most eccentric, of France's New Realist writers is Claude Simon, author of the powerful and murky novel, The Wind (TIME, April 13). His current book is a little less powerful and somewhat more murky. Author Simon's moody, fitful sentences blow on for a thousand words or so before subsiding. He qualifies each thought, hedges each qualification, follows divergent ideas out of sight through cat's cradles of parentheses and dashes. He is as fond as Faulkner of the present participle. When it seems that he must stop, affix a period...
...HERITAGE AND ITS HISTORY (249 pp.)-Ivy Compton-Burnett-Simon & Schuster...
...Simon Challoner, the turn-of-the-century hero of Heritage, hopes to inherit the sprawling country manor that his father rules and his childless uncle owns. Papa obligingly dies, but seventyish Uncle Edwin refuses to follow suit. (Death is ardently willed and obsessively discussed in Compton-Burnett novels, usually because it is the survivors' only means to get hold oi the estate.) Instead, Uncle Edwin marries a thirtyish neighbor named Rhoda. Since age has made Uncle Edwin's conjugal privileges meaningless, the marriage is a big surprise but, hereditarily speaking, no calamity. In a moment of passion (passion...
Over the years, as Uncle Edwin turns a hale 80 and a hearty 90, Simon watches his proper children being fed the crumbs of poor relations. But the worst is yet to be. As a symbol of that horror which she sees at the core of things. Novelist Compton-Burnett reverts, as she always has, to the crime that affrighted the Greek tragedians-incest. The day comes when Simon's daughter tells him she loves Hamish, whom she does not know to be her halfbrother...