"The Cheater" and "The Tightrope" by Claude Simon: genesis album

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Minuit is publishing the Nobel Prize winner's first two novels, dating from 1945 and 1947. While not rejecting them, the writer, who died in 2005, had not wanted them reissued; the publisher has taken the plunge, offering them "as an archive."

Claude Simon, in Paris, in 1936. (Philippe Halsman/ Magnum Photos)

Any reader of Claude Simon will have no doubt dreamed of the list "By the same author" placed at the head of each of his books, and beginning with "Le Tricheur, roman, 1945, out of print " and "La Corde raide, 1947, out of print " . Out of print? How could one not want to read them? Now one can. Minuit offers these two texts in a single volume. Why was this not possible until now? Because Claude Simon did not want it. Yet, without ensuring that his early texts were reissued, he did not reject them. They were part, he said, of "a slow evolution by trial and error" which led to Le Vent (1957), this "new departure in his work", as Alastair B. Duncan writes in his introduction to the first of Claude Simon's two Pléiade volumes, established during his lifetime. He died in 2005 .

Some specialists of the writer, like Jean-Yves Laurichesse, were in favor of a reissue. Others, not. "In accordance with the author's wishes" , the Pléiade does not include Le Tricheur or La Corde raide , published by Sagittaire in 1945 and 1947. Nor do the two following novels, published in 1952 and 1954 by Calmann-Lévy, Gulliver and the