Holy Fool

THE WIND (254pp.)--Claude Simon--Braziller ($3.50).

The man is tall, worn, woebegone. He stammers foolishly when he tries to speak, often does not hear what is said to him. A creased, dirty raincoat is his unvarying costume; he wanders abstractedly, clutching a camera and a sackful of pointless documents. Says a woman, exasperated to find herself in love with him: "What do you think you are, a saint?" That is precisely the point about Antoine Montes: he is a scarecrow and a chronic victim, but he is also a kind of saint--a holy fool.

The morality tale told by French Novelist Simon is harsh and gloomy. The story of Montes' futile wanderings is told through the recollections of derisive and uncomprehending French villagers, resifted by the man who collected the gossip, and who was the gaunt man's only close acquaintance. Antoine Montes came to the savagely provincial winegrowing town to claim an inheritance, the narrator recalls, his memory distorted by a sense of tragedy lurking in his background. The newcomer's father was once a prosperous winegrower. His mother surprised her husband making love to a maid and, with her baby still unborn, retreated grimly to the distant home. From such earth, Author Simon grows a strange, sour wine.

He does not explain his saint. Perhaps, his justification might run, there is no explanation for the existence of a man so out of joint with his world that he cannot feel hate, is incapable of acting in self-interest or even self-protection. He is a blind soul who probes his way, not with the white cane of rationality but with a mild, gentle love.

More Than Matter. In the course of the story, Montes touches three people--a broad-hipped mare of a peasant woman, with whom he sits for one evening and talks; and her two little girls, who follow him about for the gumdrops he hands out. But fate, Novelist Simon seems to be saying with irony, cooperates enthusiastically in making martyrs of saints; the woman is murdered, and the two children are taken away. "Man," writes the author, "is doubtless something more than matter; perhaps not much more, but all the same a little something more, just enough for his misery and his misfortune."

Blowing incessantly, desiccating the town and the vineyards, pausing only to howl at a higher pitch, is a "furious monotonous purposeless wind"--hence the book's title. It is the breath of a malevolent universe and carries the inevitability of human defeat.

Taste of Sorrow. Author Simon's harsh, hard-blowing prose suggests, in the oblique way of poetry, the wind he writes of. A member of France's school of New Realists (TIME. Aug. 4; Oct. 13), he sprawls 1,000-word sentences, nested with concentric sets of parenthetical statements and restatements, across four-page expanses of type. The flow of words, like the wind, halts for a moment, then rushes on, engulfing a stabbing or a casual conversation with the same intensity. Simon rewrites without editing (a mouth is "closed again immediately afterwards, or rather pursed again, or rather sealed") and, in the New Realists' fashion, sets down the slightest detail with the pointillist's fanatic care. Yet his prose-wind's repeated excesses, by equating the important with the trivial, reinforce a savage statement of meaninglessness.

In the end, though, Simon's poeticizing betrays him. His final gust tastes too much of sorrow spooned with a sophomore's relish: "Soon [the wind] would blow up great storms across the plain, tear the last red leaves from the vines, strip the trees bent beneath it, its strength unimpeded, purposeless, doomed to exhaust itself endlessly, without hope of an end, wailing its long nightly complaint as if it were sorry for itself, envying the sleeping men, transitory and perishable creatures, envying them their possibility of forgetfulness, of peace: the privilege of dying."

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