Mount TBR #39

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

French Title: Trois chambres à Manhattan

Year: 1946

Englished: 1964

Three Beds in Manhattan – Georges Simenon

He is a middle-aged male whose life has come to a halt after a painful divorce. Nothing like a wife deserting with a younger gigolo to force a forty-nine-year-old into painful introspection and an existential tailspin.  She has become homeless because the marriage of the friends she had been living with got stormy. They are French-speaking Europeans adrift in a grey New York City just after WWII. They meet in a creepy bar:

On the corner, its high windows lit violently, aggressively, with boastful vulgarity, was a sort of long glass cage where people could be seen as dark smudges and where he went in just so as not to be alone.

… The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn’t go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

They will cling to each other, hang out in bars, wander Manhattan to repel loneliness. They find a hotel, spend a night in desperate love-making, then another. They will discover each other and themselves with an aching lucidness, with no illusions.

However, though neither of them seems to be able to move away, the past steals up and taps them on the shoulder, forcing them to separate and threatening the frail balance that had been established between them. He feels jealousy, she likes to tell him dubious adventures riddled with contradictions in time and logic.

He goes to a hang-out of expatriate Frenchmen to tangle with a cynical old friend, a hollow worldling  who throws a temptation in our hero’s way. On her trip, she will be confronted with her relatives, with her old life. However, each of their mistakes will eventually bring them closer.

Like The Little Saint, this existential novel stands alone in its tender description of the discovery of middle-aged love and the fear of losing it. Not to mention the fear of oneself too, one’s own cowardly backsliding. If the psychological probing doesn’t sound appealing, read it for the snapshot of New York City right after WWII. Simenon is always good with place and atmosphere.