A Dragon for Christmas

Note: Another escapist story to escape this tedious present. 

A Dragon for Christmas – Gavin Black 

 

For readers wanting to get away from a plaguy present, try this thriller set in Peking in 1963. Canny Scotsman Paul Harris is a salesman of engines for marine craft the size of Chinese junks. Based in Singapore, he is despatched to the People’s Paradise to sell the commissars a thousand engines. But he meets with many problems that threaten to take his life. 

 Good characterization and an authentic background make the 250 pages, longer than I like for a mystery or thriller, go by in just a couple of nights. Paul Harris has a background that makes him a tough, clever and resourceful businessman and thriller hero. He and his older brother were born in China. During World War II he and his family were interned by the occupying Japanese. He had to become hardened and smart to deal with deprivation and violence in the camps. After the war, he and his brother started an import/export business that included a little smuggling to freedom fighters in places like Sumatra. 

The real name of the author of the 13 books in the Paul Harris series was Oswald Wynd (1913 – 1998). He is most well-known for the excellent novel The Ginger Tree, a novel about a young English girl dealing with an unsettled personal life and turbulent times in China and Japan at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. That novel was made into a Masterpiece Theater production in the late Eighties. 

Wynd was familiar with Asia because he was born a missionary child in Tokyo. He was captured during the war in Malaya and did time in a POW camp run by the Japanese. He brings to the Paul Harris character the ambivalent feelings – respect, anger, admiration, frustration, to name only a few - many people, both Western and not, feel for the delightful and exasperating Japanese and Chinese people. He also has keen insight into the psychological effects captivity, semi-starvation, torture, and prolonged stress have on its sufferers.

My Baby Loves Western Movies

In White Desert Loren Estleman skillfully combines the hard-boiled tone of PI whodunits with the conventions of westerns.

In this outing, apparently an installment in a series, a tough US Marshal goes after a gang of sadistic killers. He’s as cynical as a big-city detective, but settings he visits are pure Western. Helena, Montana is mud city. In Canada, the harsh winter is a major character.

Estleman, though, doesn’t just rely on the conventions but puts in unexpected places and characters too, such as a solid petit bourgeois household of a Meti family. Estleman shows excellent form, pace, and dialogue in this novel.

Abducting General Kreipe

Ill Met by Moonlight: The Abduction of General Kreipe - W. Stanley Moss

Patrick Leigh Fermor, the noted travel writer, plays a prominent part in this war memoir. His friend W. Stanley “Billy” Moss was a commando in the Special Operations Executive. In 1944 Moss and Fermor implemented an audacious plan to kidnap a German general in charge of a division in occupied Crete and spirit him to British-controlled Cairo.

It’s an exciting story, though Moss is frank about fatigue, bedbugs and lice, and sheer monotony of staying on the move to avoid capture. It should be its own genre, the WWI or WWII memoir by the classically educated and civilized English or Welsh or Irish or Scottish writer. 

In the tradition of Robert Graves, Richard Hillary or Laurie Lee, Moss is a keen observer, "Only John Katsias, that suave killer, remained serene and unperturbed, leaning against the boatrail and looking like a very tired aristocrat who has tried and found wanting every physical and emotional stimulus."

Hokey Smokes, Bullwinkle

Holy Smoke – Tonino Benacquista

In 1991 this crime novel won three mystery prizes: the 813 Trophy, the Grand Prix de la Littérature Policière and the Prix Mystère de la Critique. 

Antoine “Antonio” Polsinelli is a second generation Parisian who has a positive dislike of his ancestral land. He even keeps to a minimum visits to his parents in their Little Naples suburb of Paris. On a visit there, however, he is waylaid by a childhood friend with whom he now shares nothing in common. Under a vague sense of obligation, he agrees to write a love letter for Dario, a low-life gigolo who also sings stuff like Funiculì Funiculà in a hostess bar. When Dario is found dead with a bullet to the head, Tonio finds to his mortification that Dario has left him 10 acres of vineyard in the dusty natal town of their parents, somewhere east of Naples.

On visiting his little patch of heritage and future in an ever- changing world, Tonio finds the wine undrinkable. And that Dario had set up an elaborate scam. I won’t relate details as that would constitute a monstrous spoiler. Suffice to say, like any farmer planning to work and working to plan, Tonio pulls off the scam. But our hero finds various downsides to his undrinkable wine skyrocketing in value. His newfound riches make the peasants vicious and jealous. Not only do they sic their mindless violent kids on him, he also receives disturbing visits from representatives of the Mafia and the Papacy. The comedy is dark and acerbic, even tougher on Southern Italians than Andrea Camilleri.

How will Antonio get out of the clutches of these formidable institutions and return to a normal life in Paris? The action is well-paced and the climax is a rocker that keeps us reading closely until the end. The author’s style has verve and reading a mystery with an exotic location will take the grateful reader out of “times of disruption” for a couple of hours.

The Ides of Perry Mason 15

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of the Foot-Loose Doll – Erle Stanley Gardner

Usually mysteries starring super-lawyer Perry Mason open in Mason’s office. However, Gardner departs from custom with one of the longest first chapters that he ever wrote in his 75- Mason-book output. In the initial chapter, about ten percent of the book, he tells the odd story of Mildred Crest and the mess she landed in.

A working woman, Mildred receives a double blow. Her fiancée breaks their engagement and vanishes with funds he purloined from his accounting firm.  She then does what lots of Americans do when they are agitated: she jumps into her car and drives around aimlessly.

Distraught and thus distracted from noticing another person is as desperate as she is, she gives a girl hitchhiker named Fern Driscoll a lift. Fern explains  that she is escaping from a young man who first picked her up and got fresh, like a wolf. Fern grabs the wheel and the car plunges down into a Southern California abyss. Mildred then does what anybody would when presented with the chance to start a new life. She assumes the identity of the dead hitchhiker.

The problem, of course, is that we should be really picky about just whose identity we filch. The hitchhiker has a past. It catches up with Mildred in the guise of blackmailing PI Carl Harrod. The dodgy PI gets an icepick in his chest.  Poor Mildred, who has just made a couple unfortunate choices anybody could’ve chosen, finds herself up against charges that she snuffed both the hitchhiker and the blackmailer.

Like Dame Agatha, Gardner was not a producer of pretty prose. For instance, in this one his subtle wit names a hotel Vista del Camino - A View of the Road. What distinguishes his writing is the sheer narrative power – once started, must finish! Also, he plays lots of enjoyable tricks with two bullets or multiple guns so in this one it is six – count ‘em, six – icepicks.

To me, the lasting attraction of Gardner’s fiction is that the deadly issues of improper police procedures, eyewitness misidentification and incorrect understanding of circumstantial evidence are still dangerous issues for people today who wittingly or not fall afoul of our criminal justice system. Recall, it is a system that is staffed by human beings, entities not known for perfection.

Persuaded in their own minds that Mildred is the perp, the police manipulate and prime an impressionable  eyewitness to misidentify Mildred as the one who bought the icepicks.  And witnesses may testify falsely, though they will swear up and down they are telling the truth (the research on witness unreliability turned my hair white). Because juries and judges are unduly receptive to eyewitness evidence, wrongful convictions are frequently caused by witness misidentifications.  Usually circumstantial  evidence - when it is correctly construed - is the best evidence. But in this story, the DA’s office misinterprets such evidence.   

It’s an existential issue: cops, witnesses, juries, and judges may be convinced they are doing the right thing, but the reality is that they may be doing some poor joker – or Cousin Scooter, or you, or me  - a monstrous injustice. Hoo-boy. Who needs to read about ordinary people that make the usual unfortunate decisions and end up dealing with a hostile universe in Simenon, Camus or Sartre when you can read Erle Stanley Gardner?

Back to the Classics #18

I read this book for my round two of the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Classic with a Name in the Title. This 1873 novel is the fourth of the Palliser series, after Can You Forgive Her?, the prequel to this one Phineas Finn: The Irish Member, and The Eustace Diamonds. When young ‘uns ask me, “What did you do during the 2020 pandemic,” I’m gonna tell ‘em, “I wore a mask, worked from home, and read the six Palliser novels.”

Phineas Redux  – Anthony Trollope

When the novel opens, Irishman Phineas Finn is lured out of a sinecure in Dublin by his friend, the Whig politician Barrington Erle. Erle says of Finn “He's the best Irishman we ever got hold of” to run for a seat in the working class district of gritty Tankerville, against the long-time Tory incumbent. During the campaign the English workingmen pay little attention to the Tory’s stoking prejudice against “Irish Papists.” The tally comes out so close that Finn demands a recount and wins. Angry at being told to go fly a kite by Finn, editor of a scandal sheet Quintus Slide fumes to himself:

And yet this wretched Irishman, who had wriggled himself into Parliament on a petition, getting the better of a good, downright English John Bull by a quibble, had treated him with scorn,—the wretched Irishman being for the moment like a cock on his own dunghill.

Our hero’s luck, however, rather fades with this victory. An influential liberal, Mr. Bonteen, doubts the party discipline of Finn: “I never liked him from the first, and always knew he would not run straight. No Irishman ever does.” In one of the best chapters Trollope ever wrote, an attempt is made on Finn’s life, but the last of his luck runs out in that his life is preserved but his reputation takes a battering. Finn lands, through untoward circumstances, in the deepest trouble a person can face.

I’m keeping plot and incident obscure not only because I’m a sloppy writer but also I have a horror of being the bearer of spoilers. And though Trollope despised surprising the reader, he still provided unexpected plot twists, so I enjoyed the dramatic incidents in the last quarter of volume one and whole of volume two. Even the romcom subplot didn’t try my patience, nor did the inevitable fox-hunting scenes. I used to sneer at Harry Potter fans for enduring hundreds of pages of quidditch, but no more for I have tolerated page after page on the amusements of hunting.

In any case, plot is not Trollope’s main concern. Trollope focuses on the mysteries of his characters’ psychologies. For instance, Laura Kennedy's feeling of hopeless love for Finn comes out in a conversation with Violet (born Effingham), now wife of Lord Chiltern.

“...If a woman,—a married woman,—be oppressed by such a feeling, she should lay it down at the bottom of her heart, out of sight, never mentioning it, even to herself."

"You talk of the heart as though we could control it."

"The heart will follow the thoughts, and they may be controlled. I am not passionate, perhaps, as you are, and I think I can control my heart...."

For Trollope, thoughts and emotions are interdependent and we depend on our emotions to find our own preferences and thus become our own people, not the tools of others. We are responsible to use our self-awareness and common sense to control our emotions and prevent fear, distress, and elation from influencing us to the point where we make unreasonable judgments and disastrous decisions. Trollope gives us examples of immoderate characters who have failed to rein in their emotions and thus allowed them to bolt and carry them into dismal country.

Lord Fawn, former suitor of Lying Lizzie Eustace, gives the police such an inaccurate description that the wrong man is charged and put on trial. And on the witness stand Lord Fawn’s testimony is so garbled that the innocent man is almost convicted. Lord Fawn is shaken over his part in nearly causing an injustice to occur. Inordinately embarrassed and unreasonably fearing his reputation is in tatters, he literally hides himself and disappears out of London.

Robert Kennedy feels that wives must be obedient to their husbands’ ways. A control freak due to insecurity, he is so unreasonably demanding that that he drives his wife Lady Laura out of the house. In his loneliness and despair, he becomes obsessed with the falsehood that Finn has purposely broken up his marriage. The obsession eventually drives him off his dot, as poor Louis Trevelyan’s did in He Knew He Was Right. Talk about a guy that needed some moderation.

In the comic romcom triangle, country gentleman Mr. Spooner is refused by Adelaide Palliser who was in the neighborhood visiting the domestic bliss of the Chilterns. He clings to the irrational idea that is crazy for her to choose poverty with Gerard Maule, the poor aristo she loves, over wealth and comfort with Spooner’s prosperity. He is so upended by her refusal that he predicts to Violet, with whom he’s had a heart-to-heart:

"I'd give half I've got in all the world," said the wretched man, "just to get it out of my head. I know what it will come to." Though he paused, Lady Chiltern could ask no question respecting Mr. Spooner's future prospects. "It'll be two bottles of champagne at dinner, and two bottles of claret afterwards, every day. I only hope she'll know that she did it. Good-bye, Lady Chiltern. I thought that perhaps you'd have helped me."

Wonderful and wise of Trollope, too, with the line “I only hope she'll know that she did it.” Talk about taking responsibility for one’s own feelings and actions. If life plays a dirty trick on us and a loving family life, respect and esteem, wealth and worldly comfort elude our grasp – especially if the rewards of romantic love are not ours to be had – we had better not become slaves to despondency but cultivate the courage and wisdom in us to carry on. Life - like a pandemic - is long. It is thus in our own best interest to have fortitude, to persist, to resist quitting, to work hard to be self-aware and live unhindered by nutty feelings.

Trollope also does a great job characterizing clueless young aristo Gerard Maule and his father Maurice (said Morris, I think, in England) whom the normally charitable Finn calls “that padded old dandy.” When Trollope provides examples of the scurrilous editorials of Quintus Slide, it’s an extremely funny parody of oily odious sanctimony. Trollope uses the comic name to good effect too: “Confucius Putt was the distinguished artist with whom the Prince had shaken hands on leaving the club.” Confucius Putt! That’s even funnier than the Irish town he made up in the first Phineas – Paldoodie.

Best of all, Lady Glencora, in all her impulsivity, generosity, jaunty irreverence and love of capriciousness, rises in the world. Trollope ends the novel explicitly assuring she will never change, which will warm the hearts of readers who enjoy her and want to read the novel again primarily because of her scenes. In uncertain plaguey times like these, we hardcore readers need all the rocks of Gibraltar we can get. Never change, Cora, never ever change!

Bernard Bailyn

On Friday, August 7, Bernard Bailyn, a Harvard scholar who specialized in the study of the origins of the American Revolution, died of heart failure at his home in suburban Boston. He was 97.

Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence - Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyn is a Harvard professor emeritus whose specialty is U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era history. Though he has appeared on The Brian Lamb Channel only once, he is a winner of two Pulitzers, a National Book Award, a National Humanities Medal and a Bancroft, which may mean nothing to the lay public but is the most prestigious prize among American historians

This 1990 book is a collection of nine essays on the Revolution and one on the Constitution. Bailyn’s basic thesis is that the passionate ideology in favor of liberty and the spirit of individualism motivated the British Americans to revolt against the central authority of the crown

In the essays about John Adams, Tom Paine and Harbottle Dorr, Bailyn shows that revolutionaries convinced themselves and others that evil ministers crafted British policies in order to enslave the colonists. The essay on Tom Paine argues that the power of the pamphlet  Common Sense  comes from its fiery arguments against colonists' fundamental anxieties about severing ties with The Mother Country. In these biographical sketches Bailyn explains the personalities and motivations of leaders and lesser figures (three essays cover religious figures who felt ambivalent about the Revolution) and how their psychology, or will, influenced their behavior

Bailyn holds the point of view that the less important causes of the Revolution were social factors -  such as the differing interests between elites, rich merchants, a struggling middle class, and the poor and vulnerable

I especially liked the article on Tory official Thomas Hutchinson, who is mainly remembered for being reviled by John Adams. I also enjoyed the piece about the difficult figure of Thomas Jefferson, whom Bailyn thinks is a mediocre thinker but an extremely pragmatic politician. The piece on the momentous year of 1776 brings together what thinking readers already know in new, provocative ways. The final essay covers the anti-Federalists’ criticisms of the Constitution and thus examines the tension between lofty political philosophy and grubby political decision-making.

Bailyn’s prose has more style than we expect from a professor. He makes clear difficult ideas and seems impartial to all sides. Lay readers – like me - will be challenged but rewarded.

Back to the Classics #17

I read this book for my second round of the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2020.

Classic by a Woman. Ken Kesey said, “We go to concerts to hear a piece by Bach not because we want to be intellectuals or scholars or students of Bach, but because the music is going to help us keep our moral compass needle clean.” It’s a good reason to read Austen too. She is writing about moderation and self-knowledge in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility.  She’s writing about respecting people and being fair in Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Mansfield Park. Jane Austen writes about gratitude and triumph in this one: “… she went to her room, and grew steadfast and fearless in the thankfulness of her enjoyment.” Resolute and brave – boy, are we gonna need those in the next six months.

August 9, 1787 is Anne Elliot’s birthday. May the next 233 years be as inspiring.

Persuasion – Jane Austen

The novel tells the story of Anne Elliot, 27 years old and still unmarried, not a great age or martial status for a female in Regency England. Seven years earlier, she was persuaded by her silly father and a narrow-minded mother-figure to break off an engagement with navy man Frederick Wentworth.

She was persuaded to believe the engagement a wrong thing: indiscreet, improper, hardly capable of success, and not deserving it. But it was not a merely selfish caution, under which she acted, in putting an end to it. Had she not imagined herself consulting his good, even more than her own, she could hardly have given him up.

Anne breaks off the engagement with Wentworth because she’s persuaded that it’s her duty to do so and at only 19 she is too young to disrespect authority. Also, she’s persuaded herself she does this for his own good. Fred doesn’t see it that way and feels ill-used but he doesn’t stop loving her. In the Navy, Fred becomes rich by taking prizes from the tyrant Bonaparte and after seven years returns home, causing Anne to wonder if old flames can be rekindled.

Thus, the story is about as simple as simple gets. The attraction is that Austen peoples the novel with great characters, both naughty and nice. The nice people are candid and brave and wise and don’t stand on ceremony. Admiral and Mrs. Croft and the Harvilles are ideal married couples. The awful people are comically awful in their selfishness, vanity, and treatment other people as if they were trinkets. Youngest sister Mary in particular is hilarious as a whining hypochondriac, jealous of any attention given to other people.

Yes, I made the best of it; I always do: but I was very far from well at the time; and I do not think I ever was so ill in my life as I have been all this morning: very unfit to be left alone, I am sure. Suppose I were to be seized of a sudden in some dreadful way, and not able to ring the bell! So, Lady Russell would not get out. I do not think she has been in this house three times this summer.

Calling to mind Fielding and Smollett, Austen has an 18^th century bluntness.

The real circumstances of this pathetic piece of family history were, that the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year; that he had been sent to sea because he was stupid and unmanageable on shore; that he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved; seldom heard of, and scarcely at all regretted, when the intelligence of his death abroad had worked its way to Uppercross, two years before.

And she has the satirist’s ear for lawyerly wheedling and oleaginous obsequiousness:

I presume to observe, Sir Walter, that, in the way of business, gentlemen of the navy are well to deal with. I have had a little knowledge of their methods of doing business; and I am free to confess that they have very liberal notions, and are as likely to make desirable tenants as any set of people one should meet with. Therefore, Sir Walter, what I would take leave to suggest is, that if in consequence of any rumours getting abroad of your intention; which must be contemplated as a possible thing, because we know how difficult it is to keep the actions and designs of one part of the world from the notice and curiosity of the other; consequence has its tax; I, John Shepherd, might conceal any family-matters that I chose, for nobody would think it worth their while to observe me; but Sir Walter Elliot has eyes upon him which it may be very difficult to elude; and therefore, thus much I venture upon, that it will not greatly surprise me if, with all our caution, some rumour of the truth should get abroad; in the supposition of which, as I was going to observe, since applications will unquestionably follow, I should think any from our wealthy naval commanders particularly worth attending to; and beg leave to add, that two hours will bring me over at any time, to save you the trouble of replying.

The next attraction is the inescapable feeling of “in the world” in this novel. That is, Austen deftly moves her puppets about rooms, concert halls, inns, streets, pubs. Motion and bustle and agitation are constant. Caused by high spirits, the collarbone injury of Mary’s older son and the traumatic brain injury sustained by lively Louisa bring about key plot turns.

In this novel, we feel the half-comfort, half-discomfort of close proximity to our fellow creatures, so like us, but not us, that pleasant but unpleasant  sensation we get whenever we detect somebody else’s warmth on a just-vacated chair. People move close to each other on couches, on concert benches or on seats in carriages.

For example, the Crofts see that Anne is worn out by the death march the Regency English called a walk, and they assure her there is room in their carriage and proceed to “compress themselves into the smallest possible space to leave her a corner.”

In a street scene the Admiral tells Anne, “Yes, yes we will have a snug walk together, and I have something to tell you as we go along. There, take my arm; that's right; I do not feel comfortable if I have not a woman there.” In our days of physical distancing, how we envy nearness.

As for the end of physical reality in life – the big sleep, if you will – the off-stage body count soars in this novel: Anne’s mother, Lady Russell’s husband, Mrs. Clay’s husband, William Elliot’s wife, Captain Benwick’s wife, the Musgrove’s son, Mrs. Smith’s husband, Lady Dalrymple’s husband. Though I think if you survived infancy and childhood you had good chance to live many years, it took until 1820 for life expectancy in England to break 40.

It’s not just physical-ness in this novel, however. Another attraction is that Austen knows that feelings are intricate, hard to handle, and liable to change with time. Managing feelings through rationality is a self-care method that isn’t easy or timely or 100% effective. When Fred returns after seven years have gone down the pike, Anne recognizes deep feelings for Wentworth have not just gone away.  “Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not.”  Numerous times in hustle-bustle Anne has to get away and find space and time to reflect on how she should respond what she is feeling. Maybe Anne will reincarnate as a cognitive behavioral therapist, helping  her clients dispute nutty feelings.

Highly recommended. Poor Anne is the smart reader, imposed upon and disregarded in every sense by her family of foolish spendthrifts. One wonders if we hardcore readers connect with Austen’s readers because we too have heard from the Marys, “He will sit poring over his book, and not know when a person speaks to him, or when one drops one's scissors, or anything that happens,” and been starved for a kind word as so many people, not just readers, are in what we laughingly call the real world. We like Austen’s message that knowing ourselves, though it’s a hard ongoing process in a money-mad world always in flux, goes a long way toward a flourishing life.

Back to the Classics #16

I read this book for my round two of the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Classic Adaptation. Based on the 1942 novel by Georges Simenon, La Vérité sur Bébé Donge was made into a 1952 movie starring two stars of the French screen Danielle Darrieux and Jean Gabin. Noir to the core, the movie is harsher and more cynical about marriage than a Hollywood movie of the Fifties would’ve dared to be but it's still a movie and thus the novel’s nuances don't survive the script writers. Reviewers say that the husband’s character is made more detestable, the wife’s character is made more victimized so the transformations to sympathetic and desperate respectively are thrown into sharp relief for a mass audience that wouldn’t get it otherwise. Such transformations are believable to us hardcore readers only if the performers are credible so I wouldn't be surprised if Mlle Darrieux’ doe-eyed despair is wrenching and Gabin, whom I've seen but can't remember in what, convincingly pulls off his realization he’s been clueless.

The Truth About Bebe Donge – George Simenon (1942)

Just an ordinary Sunday in August, in their country house in La Châtaigneraie, when Mrs. Donge, Eugenie called Bebe (Baby), uses arsenic to poison Mr. Donge, François.

Nothing like attempted murder to force a would-be victim into unwonted introspection. In the classic liminal space of the hospital, François concludes that his consummate selfishness in the guise of devotion to work caused him to ignore his wife and son. He also concludes that Bebe’s lack of response to his many extra-marital adventures may have looked like indifference but really her silence was out of pain and shame that her sexual coldness drove him away. François thinks he may have been mistaken to believe she was what she seemed to be: vain, distant, secretive, and possibly in a Sapphic relationship with a neighbor everybody called The Old Mare, because of her horsey frame.

François wonders whether he may never have really loved his wife. An idealized but deeply wounded love for him that she apparently lost is the only explanation he can come up with for her motive. He ends up imagining that she felt he was inflicting “mental cruelty,” a grounds for divorce her lawyer says works in the US but not in France. Bebe telegraphically tells the police interrogators “It was him or me ... .”

So about a third of the book is François’ going over flashbacks and mulling over the big issues of his marriage. We readers have to be wary about accepting François‘ self-recriminations since they may not be based on a clear view of the situation. We have to wonder about Bebe, who is reticent.

Her family was worldly: she and her sister Jeanne grew up in Constantinople where her weak and submissive father worked in transportation and her flashy brilliant mother was the informal hostess of the French embassy. But her family was under stress: her father was a serial cheat and kept her mother in the dark about everything; when her mother returned to France, she became just an ordinary woman rather than a big fish in a small fishbowl, a common ex-expatriate experience (trust me, I know).

Bebe is nostalgic for a childhood that she never had, ideally protected from the inevitable adversity of the real world, from fathers that lie and skulk and mothers that are not available. Bebe also has a teenager’s lofty conception of truth. Early in the marriage, she exacts a promise from François that he will never keep anything from her. Any married person will tell you a steady diet of the unvarnished truth from a partner is, shall we say, not sustainable.

As for the frigidity, one doubts if in 1942 French women had any options for treatment at all. So much unhappiness over sexual incompatibility, especially when people had no clue how treat such issues. With no intimacy with her husband, Bebe lives a hollow life, as if she has no reason to exist but to dedicate hours to her personal appearance, initiate endless interior decorating projects, and translate the English poets with The Old Mare, all of which are activities her husband pays zilch attention.

If in fact François reveals himself incapable of love, understanding and kindness towards his wife and the life in which she seeks to exist, hard-headed readers wonder about the passive expectations and the complacent stupor which characterize Bebe. In hospital when François asks his sister-in-law Jeanne, in the first conversation about something important he has with her, about Bebe’s motives, she bluntly tells him Bebe has always been distant and secretive, nobody really knows her, and Bebe, like everybody else, is responsible for her own happiness. Very much of this world and its simple pleasures and pains, Jeanne urges François not to think so much, not unreasonable advice when dealing with unanswerable questions.

Simenon’s examination of the suffering of these two married people is precise and judgment-free. The naturalistic writing, the plain vocabulary, gives a masterful power to the text. How relatable all this is depends on the reader.