Books: As She Lay Dying

THE GRASS (216 pp.)—Claude Simon, translated by Richard Howard—Braziller($3.75).

The best, and one of the most eccentric, of France's New Realist writers is Claude Simon, author of the powerful and murky novel, The Wind (TIME, April 13). His current book is a little less powerful and somewhat more murky. Author Simon's moody, fitful sentences blow on for a thousand words or so before subsiding. He qualifies each thought, hedges each qualification, follows divergent ideas out of sight through cat's cradles of parentheses and dashes. He is as fond as Faulkner of the present...

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