The Palace (Simon novel)

The Palace (French: Le Palace) is a novel by Claude Simon published on September 1, 1962 by Les Éditions de Minuit.

Synopsis

Claude Simon describes the expectation of combat for a group of Republican volunteers in Barcelona during the Spanish War, when the city was agitated by conflicts between anarchists and Republicans. In 1936, he was a student in the city. The Palace described is located on Passeig de Gràcia. The American is George Orwell. The author returns to this war in The Georgics, where he reinterprets the capture of a Francoist fortress described by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. The last sentence of the novel, refers to corpses stored in underground public toilets, which are located under the Plaça de Catalunya, at the Portal de l'Àngel. The set of elements disseminated in the various novels of Claude Simon on this civil war allows to locate precisely the scenes, especially the Palace — title of the work — but also the café and the cinema to which it refers.

Characters

• The student — the main character of the novel. He listens to what is said around him, similar to the reader in that, but with distraction, as a passive spectator and without managing to feel concerned: the precise story of the Italian appears to him as if in a cloud (part 2), the American makes him jealous with his supposed adventures with a woman (part 4), and disappears without a trace, while the student had an appointment with him (part 5).
• The American — a debonair, talkative and lucid character, he is at the center of the group of characters in the discussions.
• The Italian — he is particularly prominent in the second part, where he tells about the murder of an enemy in a restaurant. He is constantly manipulating his rifle, hence the name "rifle man", and is frequently warned about a possible accident.
• The schoolmaster — he often appears with the American, as his opposite: not very talkative, sententious, austere.
• The officer — discreet, he represents the law and history.

Editions

• Der Palast (1962; translated by Elmar Tophoven)
• The Palace (1963; translated by Richard Howard)
• Palace (1965; translated by Jean Schalekamp)
• Il Palace (1965; translated by Gioia Angiolillo Zannino)
• Palace (1966; translated by Fernando Cascais Xavier)

References

• Andrews, Mark W. (1989). "Narrative Discontinuity and the Warring Image: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Novels of Claude Simon." In: Frieda S. Brown, ed., Rewriting the Good Fight. Critical Essays on the Literature of the Spanish Civil War. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, pp. 147–60.
• Bertrand de Muñoz, Maryse (2001). Guerra y Novela: La Guerra Española de 1936-1939. Sevilla: Ediciones Alfar.