Claude Simon`s highly autobiographical novel, written when he was 88, recalls Proust in its evocation of the past by way of sense impressions from the present--chiefly, in this case, the trolley the narrator took to school when he was a boy. His descriptions of that journey become tied to his journey into oblivion as an old man on a hospital bed. A best-seller in France, Simon`s novel welds past and present into a potent evocation of one man`s life.