Das Pferd

A French dragoon regiment takes up quarters in a village in northern France on a dark rainy night and witnesses the slow death of an injured army horse. In the animal's agony and in his big eyes the apocalypse of war is reflected in an almost intimate scenery. The soldiers, the narrator and Maurice, the Jew who knows what is to come, try to fathom their own fate in the darkness of the rainy night. Claude Simon's story from 1958 takes us right into the Nobel Prize winner's thematic universe: the French debacle in the Second World War and the fate of Claude Simon, the cavalryman who fell into German captivity. A literary trouvaille in which the most important motifs and plots of all the Nobel Prize winner's later novels are already laid out.