Back to the Classics #4

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

20^th Century Classic. My sense of “classic” for Simenon’s non-Maigret novels is that they are remarkably and instructively typical of post-WWII existential novels. The philosophy – or orientation – of existentialism enjoyed a heyday after WWII. Understandably, given that war’s destruction and horrors. Simenon, though he is not as explicit about it as Camus, assumes that we are responsible for the directions our lives take (we make the choices) and that we are responsible to find ways to explain the world to ourselves and not sleepwalk through life depending on other people, customs, or authority  to guide us.

The Girl with a Squint - Georges Simenon (1951)

Rochefort, France, 1922. To flee the go-nowhere poverty of their natal town, two young girls get summer temp jobs as maids-of-all-work in a small hotel-restaurant in Fourras, Les Ondines, on the edge of a beach near La Rochelle.

Marie Gladel (eighteen) and Sylvie Danel (seventeen) are childhood friends. They have in common their desire to escape poverty and live in  Paris. However, many things separate them. Sylvie is beautiful enough to stop men in their tracks. She has a taste for the good things in life, though she has never experienced them and she’s as lazy as a toad. Demanding and selfish, she is relentless and manipulative in reaching her goals. She manages to get her fingers on what she covets, even if she has to debase herself and others to do so. The important thing is to have it and tuff luck on others.

Marie does not have the same assets. She’s cross-eyed, short, and scrawny. Not confident because of her lack of looks, she is both humble and reserved, envious and sneaky. But always straightforward and courageous; like most people, she assumes all her ways are clean, more moral than others. Still affectionate though. Marie despises and adores Sylvie, feels jealous and hates her. But she cannot do without her.

Summer does not end without Sylvie in a peck of trouble. Through her thoughtlessly provocative behavior, she eggs on to suicide a cognitively disabled young man employed in the same hotel-restaurant. She also yields to the advances of his boss, the rude and cruel Mr. Clément.

In second half of the book Simenon shifts the setting in time and place. Telling would constitute a spoiler. Simenon then show us how both Sylvie and Marie end up a life together that would have made them shudder when they were young. This plain-spoken novel explores people enabling each other in less than ideal mental health and in efforts to avoid living life as a responsible adult.