The Invitation

by Claude Simon, Louis Oppenheim (Afterword), Jim Cross (Translator)

This 1987 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Claude Simon is a sardonic look at glasnost Russia, where recent reforms and improvements carry all the conviction of rouge on a corpse. The narrator is one of fifteen international guests who have been invited on a goodwill tour of the new Soviet Union. Whisked from one staged event to another, from Moscow to Central Asia, enduring hours of rigid Soviet hospitality, the guests react with varying degrees of stupefaction and disgust to a society whose recent renovations ill-disguise a bloody and repressive past. The Invitation is a reminder that although the Cold War may be over, the past cannot and should not be forgotten; the Soviets have a new game to play―diplomacy rather than military force―but Simon voices skepticism in our current era of pro-Soviet sentiment. The chief attraction of The Invitation is Simon’s celebrated long, convoluted sentences register the narrator’s impressions, sometimes dragging with fatigue, but always sharpened with sensuous details and spiked with mordant satire. No one is named, but the reader will see through their identities as easily as the narrator sees through the sham of perestroika. This compact masterpiece of political satire concludes with an afterword by Lois Oppenheim, a noted authority on Simon’s work.

Genres: France, Fiction, Nobel Prize, Madagascar

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Awarded 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature, for being an author "who in his novel combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition."

Reviews

[Uroš Đurković · Rating 4 out of 5]

Knjiga, pozajmljena iz biblioteke, na poleđini ima zapis, ćirilicom sročen, nekog neblagonaklonog čitaoca, čija je slovna forma БОРИНГ, s čime se ja ne bih usudio složiti i to ponajviše jer su Simonove raskošne jezičke naplavine zbilja naporne, ali i fascinantno sugestivne, uz to iznenađujuće dobro izuvijane, čak i kad meandriraju ili džeziraju, i, dabome, ambiciozne, ali ne može, složićemo se, valjda, baš svaka šuša koja se lati pera pisati takve kilometarske rečenice.

Neko, ipak, može. I treba da želi da može.

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fifteen aging academics, unnamed and introspective, receive a formal invitation to a symposium in what appears to be an Eastern European city. The event, organized by a faceless committee, purports to address the theme of cultural memory, though its purpose grows increasingly elusive as the story progresses.

The city itself is a haunting presence, its architecture a patchwork of Baroque elegance and Soviet austerity, its streets echoing with lost revolutions and regimes long fallen. Simon’s descriptions of the urban landscape are precise yet evocative, with “the cobblestones slick from rain, each step a reminder of the centuries beneath one’s feet.” The symposium, held in a grand but decaying hall, becomes a stage for intellectual posturing and existential absurdity, its participants more caricatures than characters, their dialogues a blend of erudition and nonsense.

The academics' journey to the symposium serves as a catalyst for a flood of memories, each fragment layered with sensory detail. A childhood summer in pre-war France resurfaces, the air thick with the scent of lavender and the hum of cicadas, while the specter of a deceased wife lingers in the margins. Simon’s technique of juxtaposing past and present creates a disorienting yet immersive experience, where time feels less linear than cyclical.

The invitees' interactions at the symposium—particularly with a mysterious woman whose role remains ambiguous—add an undercurrent of tension, her presence grounding and destabilizing simultaneously. “Her laughter,” Simon writes, “was like a key turning in a lock, though what it opened was unclear.” The symposium itself devolves into a series of disjointed exchanges, its participants speaking past one another, their words a reflection of the futility of trying to impose order on chaos.

The Invitation is less a story about an event than an exploration of the act of being summoned—by memory, by history, by the inexorable pull of time itself.

From the afterword:
"...Neither a novel in the so-called realist tradition that allows for the full identification of reader with character and circumstance, nor one in the moral or otherwise pedagogical vein that resolves whatever issues may be at hand for the reader, it is a fiction that provokes a certain discomfort by its refusal to satisfy in either domain...

...To remain attentive to the openness of The Invitation is to approach the work neither as a medium for the transmission of information about the visit nor as a formalization of that experience. Rather, it is to perceive the power of Simon’s language to destructure the world as we know it and to reconstitute it on another order. This of course entails marginalizing the social and psychological conventions and ethical and political convictions that both inform the text and contextualize the meaning that we, as readers, give it..."

I don't know France, I prefer my books with plots.

[Simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Invitation by Claude Simon

This was a random buy in the English book shop in Bucharest a while ago and I have to say I found this a tough read. It may be only 77 pages long including the Afterword but somehow felt like I had read a 400 page book it dragged so much.
So why did I find this Nobel prize winning author so tiresome well mainly because the book reads like he had been set an exercise by an literature professor who laid out the rules that you have to write a story in which you do not name any of the characters and you do everything you can not to name any of the locations and then if possible you mustn’t say what happens at the locations either.
The book for me was an exercise in frustration notionally set in the Soviet Union just after Glasnost and Perestroika have broken out the book sort of follows a group of 15 foreign dignitaries on a summit tour to who knows where. What do they see or talk about well we never really find out.
To add to the frustration often sentences go on for two or three pages at a time like he is a beat novelist only without the drink or drugs or weird sex. Had the book furnished us with a bit more detail it might have been a really good look at a very interesting time historically that it was written a couple of years after I had visited the Soviet Union I know something of how the place felt and yet this book fails to conjure up much of anything except frustration at what’s missing from the story.
So only read this if you like to read books that go nowhere in particular and are a fan of the French New Novel movement that Claude is a part of.

[Daniel Polansky]

A lyrical, satiric depiction of a visit to the USSR in the late 80's by a group of public intellectuals, which, if you can get over the author's refusal to ever use a period, a stylistic peculiarity which is either due to some innate defect (virtue?) of the French language or, potentially, the influence of Proust on his countrymen, but in any case results in these endless seeming, though not altogether unpleasant, sentences, sentences which kind of just go on and on and on and include endless sub-clauses, allusions, asides, though very few semi-colons, which is fine, the semi-colon is the punctuation mark of cowards, for people too lily-livered to choose a proper dash, but anyway its actually a pretty good read, with some lovely language and a reasonably healthy dose of contempt for these sorts of expeditions, and indeed the concept of a public intellectual, which to my mind is a definitional oxymoron of the most embarrassing sort.

[salva · Rating 3 out of 5]

paréntesis dentro de paréntesis dentro de paréntesis??!!

[Frank Ashe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never trust a book where a (favourable) critic uses the word pleasure in inverted commas:

The "pleasure" of The Invitation thus emanates from ruptures in the signifying systems of language, from mutations in the semantic, syntactic, and paradigmatic structures that, in ordinary discourse, both restrain or contain reference and induce meaning.

Shudder ....

But maybe I read it when I wasn't in the mood. I should give it another go perhaps.

[Kamiye · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Si vous aimez les phrases de 3km de long, ce (court) livre est fait pour vous. On y voyage rapidement, découvre des lieux et des personnes qui se réunissent sans que le but précis soit bien écrit. On comprend quel peut être le lieu, on le devine.
Livre d'avant la fin du bloc URSS - stéréotypes inclus.

[Michael Pennington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful drops of words

[Jayden gonzalez · Rating 1 out of 5]

the overbearing anti-communism makes this impossible to enjoy unfortunately. i hate to not finish a book but i put this down 30 pages in, and it’s only 77 pages long lol

[Φερειπείν · Rating 4 out of 5]

Η πρόσκληση. Κλωντ Σιμόν.
📖📖📖
Ένα ιδιόμορφο λογοτεχνικό εγχείρημα, στη διάρκεια του οποίου ο Κλωντ Σιμόν, παραθέτει πληροφορίες μέσω των προσωπικών του εντυπώσεων από την επίσκεψή του στη Σοβιετική Ένωση του Γκορμπατσόφ ως ειδικός προσκεκλημένος μεταξύ άλλων, για τη συμμετοχή τους σε ένα διεθνές φόρουμ το θέμα και οι στόχοι του οποίου δεν επιδέχονται αποσαφήνιση. Η τολμηρή αυτή συγγραφική απόπειρα δύσκολα εντάσσεται σε κάποιο λογοτεχνικό είδος. Περισσότερο ομοιάζει με μια πειραματική προσέγγιση της περιγραφής, φέρει στοιχεία της αυτόματης γραφής χωρώντας ή μάλλον εκχωρώντας την ιδιαιτερότητα του πειραματισμού σ’ ένα απόλυτα προσχεδιασμένο και οργανωμένο εκφραστικό πλαίσιο, δουλεμένο με σαρκασμό και κριτική, που βρίθει από τις προσωπικές εντυπώσεις και σκέψεις του καταγράφοντος, οι οποίες ούτε στιγμή δεν στερούνται συνοχής, ενώ υποβάλλονται στο φιλτράρισμα της συνειρμικής τους δήλωσης. Τα πάντα είναι ξεκάθαρα, όσο ξεκάθαρα αναβλύζουν τα μηνύματα από ένα κείμενο του Μπέκετ με την ελευθεριότητα της εννοιολογικής μεταπήδησης του Ντε Κίρικο. Δεν υπάρχουν διπλές αναγνώσεις, ούτε υποκείμενα ή υπερκείμενα νοήματα, πέρα από την εξατομικευμένη μεν, αντικειμενική δε (υπό την έννοια της γενίκευσής της, καθώς οι εικόνες που μεταφέρονται στο χαρτί θυμίζουν σε όλους αυτό ακριβώς που περιγράφεται) άποψη του συγγραφέα- εικονολήπτη. Κι αυτό γιατί η καταγραφή του είναι μια λεπτομερέστατη κινηματογραφική απεικόνιση των τεκταινόμενων. Ο μακροπερίοδος λόγος του απαιτεί εξαντλητική πειθαρχία από τον αναγνώστη για να μη χαθεί στους σχεσιακούς δαιδάλους της σκέψης του. Η γραφή του αντλεί μια αυτάρεσκη ευχαρίστηση από την ίδια την περιγραφή, είναι εξονυχιστική και σαρωτική, ανελέητη στην κριτική της και έτσι περνάει σε μια σατυρική διάθεση και μέσω αυτής ίσως και στην αυτοκριτική. Ο Σιμόν “στολίζει” τις εικόνες του πλουσιοπάροχα με επιθετικούς προσδιορισμούς μιας καλαίσθητης γλώσσας, δουλεμένης στα εκφραστικά της εργαλεία και ως εκ τούτο ιδιαιτέρως αποδοτικής. Προσωπική μου πρόταση για έναν πειραματισμό μέσα στο πειραματικά σχηματισμένο : προσπαθήστε να το διαβάσετε πριν από ή μετά τον “Ξένο” του Καμύ και αφού κάνετε μερικές μέρες “θεραπεία” σκεφτείτε τι συνέβη στο μυαλό σας.