Simon, Claude 1913–

A French novelist, Simon began his artistic career as a painter, and painterly concepts are evident in all his fiction. Like a painter, Simon attempts to convey the multifaceted and fluid nature of reality. Simon's acknowledged indebtedness to Faulkner is evidenced in his preoccupation with time and memory as well as in his use of tense, elliptical syntactical formations, and other devices which he employs to portray reality as it is experienced and filtered through the creative perceptions of the artist. (See also CLC, Vols. 4, 9.)