Back to the Classics #23

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

Classic with a Place in the Title. “…in this early summer of 1940 … there was a bookshop at the ground floor of the Hotel Astor … I saw a two-volume box called The Tale of Genji. I had never heard of this book ….I took this home expecting I would probably not read it for quite a while but I started to read it anyway and this became literally my salvation from the newspapers from the horrible things that were going on in the world. This was a world of fiction, it is true but it was a beautiful world and was something I was craving and wanted to know more about,” said scholar & translator Donald Keene in 2011. So yeah, I will read a French novel from 1962 called Les Autres, The Others to get away from  "times of disruption" and "current conditions" But also to learn about how to live. Or in the case of these existential thrillers, how not to live.

The House on Quai Notre Dame - Georges Simenon

In his provincial hometown, Blaise Huet dropped out of architecture school. He was forced to use the connections of his rich influential Uncle Antoine to land a poorly-paid post as drawing master at the city arts school. To keep students at bay and forestall any social relations worthy of the name, he uses the no-talking method and in silence just circulates the classroom making corrections. The students therefore have resentfully nicknamed him The Silent Idiot. Just about all the adults in town see him as a loser who married a woman from the wrong side of the tracks. When Irène is not doing her nails, she cheats on him – of course - but he loves her for her faults, not her virtues, He digs that she will never challenge him, that she too is unwilling  to live anything beyond their listless animal-like existence of sleeping, eating, and boinking once in a blue moon.

Blaise is going through the motions of life, only seldom feeling anguish when he can’t avoid the streets of his childhood and youth, streets he never escaped due to his own sluggish irresponsibility. A character without knowledge, ability, reputation, or caliber, and a cuckolded husband to boot, Blaise knows he is mediocre, but in this belief he finds his own satisfaction.

Two events at the same time motivate him to relate his story of his road to self-knowledge. The death of his uncle Antoine, eminent jurist, aged 72, is caused by an overdose of barbiturates on Halloween. And his cousin Edouard, who had been missing for years, unexpectedly returns.

The events which Blaise relates reveal the hidden weave of the complicated relationships among the members of the Huet family. Uncle Antoine is the husband of Colette, 31 years his junior. At 41, she’s kept her looks, but she’s pretty neurotic. Perhaps Uncle Antoine loves her for her neuroses.

She is carrying on with Dr. Jean Floriau, the husband of Monique (born Huet), Antoine's niece. However, upon discovering her suicided husband’s corpse, Colette attempts to throw herself out a window, so Dr. Floriau checks her into a clinic. As for Lucien Huet, he is a sincere Catholic and newspaperman well-respected in the community. He did time in the Buchenwald concentration camp after he had been the victim of an anonymous denunciation that informed the occupying Germans that he joined the Resistance. After the war, he found out who the informer was, which turns up the temp on the already boiling family after uncle’s death.

Not much happens in this novel. One gets the feeling that Simenon just wanted to try first-person narrative, a device he didn’t employ much. Nor did he refer often to real life situations like families being ripped apart by deportations to camps and wartime denunciations. French funeral customs, probably long gone by now, are interesting.