European RC #6

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

French title: La Disparation d'Odile

Published: 1971

Englished: 1972, Lyn Moir

The Disappearance of Odile - Georges Simenon

The only points that date this short novel are a couple of references to hippies. Otherwise, this is a timeless story about an eighteen-year-old girl who, unable to identify the next step and feeling totally misunderstood, decides to leave Lausanne, Switzerland for the city lights of Paris. A letter left to her older brother Bob clearly indicates that Odile is thinking of taking her own life.

With the consent of and travelling money from his father, Bob cuts his college classes and goes immediately to Paris, because he is very worried. He knows little more about Odile beyond his sense that she mistakenly feels that after feeling a little friendship and a little intimacy, she is ready to leave this world forever. Since the age of 15, she has had fraught friendships and affairs that have been not good for her. What really alarms him is that before she vanished, she took her father's revolver and sleeping pills from the family medicine chest.

Bob’s peregrinations in Paris take him to clubs in the Saint Michel district. Simenon captures details. The hippie hangouts smell like cigarette smoke. The neurotic characters seem blurry because they themselves are not sure of their emotions. Simenon flashbacks to Odile and Bob’s distant parents. The father, a best-selling author of popular history, is cocooned in reading, thinking, and writing. His mother plays bridge and knocks back scotch. Neither have time to show affection or interest in their two kids. Bob could handle this indifferent treatment, Odile could not. Simenon writes in his usual restrained way as he describes a dim, out of focus emotional milieu.

Lausanne, at least in the late Sixties, sounds like a place where there is little to do for either the young or old. Switzerland sounds like a place best-suited for outdoorsy extroverts who have lots of money for equipment for hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, winter camping, etc.