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Product Description This 1987 novel by Nobel Prize-winner Claude Simon is a sardonic look at glasnost Russia, where recent reforms and improvements carry all the conviction of rouge on a corpse. The narrator is one of fifteen international guests who have been invited on a goodwill tour of the new Soviet Union. Whisked from one staged event to another, from Moscow to Central Asia, enduring hours of rigid Soviet hospitality, the guests react with varying degrees of stupefaction and disgust to a society whose recent renovations ill-disguise a bloody and repressive past. The Invitation is a reminder that although the Cold War may be over, the past cannot and should not be forgotten; the Soviets have a new game to play--diplomacy rather than military force--but Simon voices skepticism in our current era of pro-Soviet sentiment. Review "A subtle and disturbing evocation of post-glasnost Russia by Nobel-winner and nouveau romancier Simon." --Kirkus Review About the Author Claude Simon was born in 1913 in Tananarive, Madagascar and raised in Perpignan, France. His father died in battle when Simon was less than a year old. Orphaned at age eleven, he was sent to boarding school in Paris, but spent summers with relatives. As a young man, he briefly studied painting and traveled to Spain during the civil war there, where he sided with the Republicans. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985. His work has been widely translated. He died in Paris in 2005.