Claude Simon: L'Herbe (1958)

Discoveries are made, things slowly revealed to the reader, and are attained through the many digressions, parentheses, seemingly endless paragraphs and sentences. There is no conventional story, or rather the parentheses are very much part of the story of a dying eighty-four-year-old woman, Marie, whose sister was Eugénie, who (Eugénie) gave up an individual life of her own to bring up her brother Pierre, (who married Sabine), a brother now old and very fat, but who in his time was constantly unfaithful to his wife and by whom he has two daughters (Christine and Irène) and a son, Georges, who marries Louise (although she's thinking of leaving him for her lover): all this information is slowly tweaked or eked out of the ever-rambling narrative. And the book, in Claude Simon's words, appears 'to reveal this enormous disproportion between our actions and the immensity within which they are drowned'.

Here we have a representation of reality in a highly idiosyncratic, non-intellectual style, where sensations are all-important, as is memory (and Simon is associated with the nouveau roman, but this is a loose expression), and Simon believes Proust and Joyce fit into this category (nouveau roman). Writing is an act of creation, but not in an artisanal sense, where the object of creation is known from the beginning, whereas in the novel it isn't known for Simon. The description 'painterly' or 'cinematic' would be a suitable description of the sumptuous musical language, which certainly isn't to everyone's taste (as many find Simon 'difficult').