Back to the Classics #20

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

20^th Century Classic. My justification as to why Simenon’s non-Maigret novels are “classics” is that they are examples of the genre post-WWII existential novels a la The Plague, The Woman in the Dunes, and Slaughterhouse-5. Simenon, though he is not as explicit about it as Camus and Sartre, treats people as agents, with accountability for their choices. We are responsible for our decisions, the directions our lives take.

Sunday  – Georges Simenon

Simenon wrote 75 Maigret mysteries and about 200 "hard novels," psychological novels that ran characters through existential hoops. Usually a bit under 200 pages in length, the hard novels revolve around a handful of themes: remorse, escape, alienation, jealousy, desire, irresponsibility, humiliation, and fear of ostracism, poverty, and embarrassment.

Simenon often examines these themes by scrutinizing an unhappily married couple. From Three Bedrooms in Manhattan to The Truth about Bébé Donge, Simenon coolly dissected marriage – young/old, Paris/province, artisan/farmer, same class/mixed class - and the ways people grow disenchanted with and alienated from each other.

This novel opens on a typical summer Sunday morning on the Côte d'Azur. A successful restaurateur in the Cannes hinterland, Emile has decided Sunday is the day to carry out the long-planned murder of his wife. As the morning passes, our main character takes to unaccustomed introspection, going over stage by stage the process which led him to decide in the dilemma of "it's her or me" that murder was his sure bet.

At the age of 25, Emile, son of a hotelier from cold rainy Champagne, near Luçon, went to help family friends, the Harnauds, who fulfilled the dream of a lifetime when they took over a small inn on the Côte d'Azur. But as in the case of many transplants who opened restaurants, inns, and other touristy businesses in the south, the business never took off and they felt like strangers in the south. Mr. Harnaud was more than pleased, in fact, when a stroke made it impossible for him to stay in the game. His widow, eager to return to more congenial Luçon, pushed hard for the marriage of her daughter Berthe with Emile. The latter, intelligent and daring with novel recipes, made “La Bastide” into a prosperous and popular inn.

Right or wrong, Emile feels that he was sold to Berthe who acts as the real boss, from whom nothing escapes. Berthe tells him at the outset that they are to have nothing but truth between them, which he takes to mean that he is denied the autonomy that he believes is the due of a real man. Believing in the iffy claim that he is a prisoner of an unhappy, wobbly, humiliating marriage, Emile sees no other way out than murder to get out of the humiliating trap he finds himself in. Raised by loveless parents, bossed about by siblings, with no education or reading, Emile hasn't near enough principle or enough conscience to restrain him from doing wrong.  But will he dare to poison his wife?

Intelligently constructed, steeped in truth, served up in a plain style, this intimate thriller is a success on all levels.