FICTION

THE ACACIA by Claude Simon , translated from the French by Richard Howard (Pantheon: $23; 252 pp.) and THE INVITATION by Claude Simon , translated from the French by Jim Cross (Dalkey Archive Press: $15.95; 77 pp.) . A story told in short sentences tends to be swift and flat, bits of experience strung together and pulled like a train over the surface of time. A story told in very long sentences--like Faulkner’s, or French Nobel Prize-winner Claude Simon’s--is like a core sample drilled down through history, fusing multiple layers of the past to the present.

In Simon’s latest novel, “The Acacia,” his all-inclusive sentences, with their parentheses inside parentheses, tell two stories simultaneously. In 1919, a little boy, his mother and two aunts search a countryside devastated by trench warfare to find the grave of the boy’s father. And in 1940, that boy, grown up and (like Simon himself) a soldier in a cavalry unit routed by the Nazis, fights, runs, wanders the battlefield in a daze, is captured and finally escapes into Vichy territory to take refuge with the same two aunts.

Simon’s technique makes war seem a permanent condition in a Europe “seamed with scars . . . stitched together again the way they sew up the belly of a horse gored by the bull in order to offer it to the animal once again.”

In “The Invitation,” a novella first published in 1986, a group of Western celebrities (including Simon, James Baldwin and Arthur Miller, though nobody is named) visits the Soviet Union to experience glasnost and meet Mikhail Gorbachev. Here Simon’s sentences, almost purely descriptive, dust opera houses, conference rooms, steppes and monuments as if with fingerprint powder, revealing ghostly loops and whorls left by Stalin’s hands.

Simon’s novels, lacking the comic relief of Faulkner’s Southern dialogue--indeed, having hardly any dialogue at all, little plot, few names and an apparent disdain for dramatic structure--are lyrical and precisely detailed, but difficult to read. This difficulty seems to stem not from the author’s coyness but from his scrupulous desire to bypass all the conventions of popular fiction, journalism, the TV miniseries, etc., in approaching important but much-handled subjects, digging up the past that those conventions have buried and bringing it back to life.