The French writer Claude Simon, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1985, would not be published today, according to an experiment conducted by one of his fans. Writer Serge Volle sent 50 pages of Simon`s 1962 novel, `The Palace`, set during the Spanish Civil War, to 19 French publishers. The verdict was damning: Twelve rejected it and seven didn`t even bother to reply. One editor said that the book`s `endlessly long sentences completely lose the reader`, Volle told French public radio on Monday. Nor did the book have `a real plot with well-drawn characters`, the rejection letter added. Simon, one of the fathers of the `nouveau roman`, was notorious for his meandering prose, with sentences often going on for pages in his masterpiece `The Georgics` (1981). Volle, 70, claimed the refusals showed the philistinism of modern publishing, which was `abandoning literary works that are not easy to read or that will not set sales records.`
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