Sunday, June 9, 2019

Back to the Classics #10

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Classic in Translation. The translator of this novel was a British scholar of French literature and an editor of the Penguin Classics series. Perhaps to augment his not-great salary as a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, he translated numerous Simenon novels such as Maigret at the Crossroads, Maigret Goes Home, and Maigret Meets a Milord. The book reviewed here appears to be the only non-Maigret novel he Englished.  

French title: Le Veuf
Published: 1959
Englished: 1982, Robert Baldick

The Widower – Georges Simenon

In this 1959 noir, Simenon presents a compact examination of distress, tragic and throbbing like something by Ligeti. He returns to his perennial situation of a man living a routine existence, serenely deluded that he’s reached nirvana only to have an unexpected event expose his meagre existence for the desert that it is. Blind spots – his are so opaque he can't see himself as a man of silence, withdrawal, and highly-strung tightness. Therefore, he can't see that his own wife is fighting demons of her own, the least of which is her desire not to upset her blissfully ignorant husband.

Arriving home from his work as a commercial designer, Bernard Jeantet is worried not to find his wife waiting for him in their modest apartment in the Porte Saint-Denis. He learns from the police, after two days of suspense, that she has poisoned herself in a room of a luxurious furnished hotel on the Champs-Elysées. Jeantet is disturbed by how she staged doing away with herself - white dress, flowers, champagne – and by the realization she spent every Wednesday with a “friend” in the room. Per strict policy, the hotel cannot reveal the name of the “friend.”

Jeantet is told by chambermaid that a copper on the scene picked up the note his wife had left. He wants the letter very badly indeed, convinced that it will explain to him the motive of an act which he seeks to understand. Wasn’t Jeanne happy since he had married her after patching her up and harboring her, eight years earlier, when she was cuffed around on the street by her pimp?

Settling uneasily into his widowerhood, Jeantet ponders, for the first time, his life with Jeanne in their poky apartment, her indifference to housekeeping, the mediocrity of an existence made up of monotony and uneventful tranquility. They have zilch contact with other people save her relationship with a Miss Couvert, old lady who lives on the top floor with Pierre, a boy of 10 years that she raises.

An unwanted conversation with Miss Couvert brings out the woman’s assertion that “Jeanne did not even try to be happy.” She makes other revelations that, shall we say, give Jeantet pause. They also dispel Jeantet’s obsession to get hold of the suicide note. As the psychological novels sometimes do, this one ends on a hopeful note, that Jeantet taking a small step toward human contact and assuming adult responsibilities to himself and others.


Click on the year published to go to the review of the existential noir pulp.
·         The Nightclub  / L'âne rouge (1932)
·         Tropic Moon / Coup de Lune (1933). English should have been Moonstruck!
·         Aboard the Aquitaine / 45° à l'ombre (1936)
·         Talatala  / Le Blanc à lunettes (1937)
·         The White Horse Inn / Le Cheval Blanc (1938)
·         The Family Lie / Malempin (1940)
·         Uncle Charles has Locked Himself in / Oncle Charles s'est enferme (1942)
·         Act of Passion / Lettre à mon juge (1946)
·         The Reckoning / Le Bilan Malétras (1948)
·         Aunt Jeanne / Tante Jeanne (1951)
·         A New Lease of Life / Une Vive Comme neuve (1951)
·         The Burial of M. Bouvet  / L'Enterrement de Monsieur Bouvet (1952)
·         Dirty Snow / La Neige était sale (1953)
·         The Magician / Antoine et Julie (1956)
·         The Premier / Le Président (1958)
·         The Grandmother / La Vieille (1959)
·         The Fate of the Malous / Le Destin des Malou (1962)
·         The Old Man Dies / La mort d’Auguste (1966)
·         The Man on the Bench in the Barn / La Main (1968)
·         The Rich Man / Le Riche Homme (1970)
·         The Disappearance of Odile / La Disparation d'Odile (1971)
·         The Innocents / Les Innocents (1972)
·         The Glass Cage / La Cage de Verre (1973)


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