I read this for
the European Reading Challenge 2014.
Tante Jeanne aka
Aunt Jeanne – Georges Simenon 1950 , tr. By Geoffrey Sainsbury 1953
At Poitiers, where she
had to change trains, she hadn’t been able to resist temptation. Ten times, dragging her suitcase, she had passed in front of the
bar. The feeling of discomfort in her chest was really
scary and it got worse each time she approached her
goal. It was like a great bubble of air,
certainly quite as big as one of her breasts, which was trying to force it way upward to her throat, to find an exit, and she waited anxiously motionless,
staring in front of her, feeling sure at moments that she was
going to die.
A 57-year-old woman returns to her home village
not far from Poitiers after forty years of a marginal existence
overseas. Tired, overweight, and suffering
idiopathic edema in her legs, she seeks refuge and
security in the bosom of her family, now headed by her brother
Robert. He’s running the family business in the wine trade.
However, instead of the stability and security she was seeking, Aunt Jeanne
finds an eccentric family in the throes
of a recent tragedy. The first son, Julien, has been killed in car crash
brought on by the usual symptoms of trouble, night driving at a high rate of
speed, overuse of alcohol, and alpha-male stupidity.
Alice, the immature 20-year-old widow of Julien, displays indifference to
her infant son Bob, and fights boredom by just leaving
the kid at home and hanging out with her rummy friends.
Henri, the second son, has a weak character. Madeleine, the daughter,
is stuck-up about and wounded by her own promiscuity. Both despise their mother Louise, Jeanne’s sister-in-law, because she drinks too much and is prone to hysterics.
It’s a troubled family beset by money worries, acting out dramas, slamming
doors, and noisy arguments punctuated with frozen silences. As Alice’s mother, the
inevitable tight-fisted and unpleasant in-law, tartly observes, “It’s a
madhouse.”
Since everybody is incapable or apathetic, Jeanne takes over the management of the household. Simenon,
indirectly as usual, illustrates that when we have to think about others we
often forget our own problems such as despair, fatigue, overweight,
and edema. Aunt Jeanne’s quiet efficiency earns
the confidence of the family and their grudging gratitude, as far as small-minded people can feel
it. The family faces a financial crisis that narrows their choices
drastically, which is simultaneously lucky and unlucky for them. Aunt Jeanne herself then evaluates three possible responses to change,
depending on family, depending on the state, and, as we’d expect in Simenon’s
existential novels of the Fifties, doing away with herself.
But, like in the other non-Maigret novels, the characters find that though
their alternatives are limited, they must face reality and settle for what life
throws at them. Nothing is completely good or completely bad. We have to accept
new exhaustions,
new misunderstandings or new ungratefulness because it’s the world. Despite
the simple plot and writing style, Simenon is complex and
ambiguous. His novels plunge us readers in an intense world of forms, colors,
scents, noises, flavors and feelings. Even secondary characters are vivid, in
this case, Désirée, Aunt
Jeanne’s old convent buddy; the cold as ice medico Dr. Bernard; and the
reptilian ancient lawyer Monsieur Bigeois. Simenon only gradually, tantalizingly
reveals reasons why people do what they do.
People live in the same house,
sleep in the same bed or separated only by thin walls, sit down for
meals together three times a day, and then are surprised to discover, one fine
day, that they know nothing whatever about each other.
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