Captain Pamphile

Captain Pamphile – Alexandre Dumas; tr. Andrew Brown, 1843911345

This is a novella by the author of The Three Musketeers. I read the first couple hundred pages of The Count of Monte Cristo about 40 years ago (I can’t believe it either), so reading about the adventures of the ruthless Captain Pamphile reminded me that Dumas had a high degree of vitality and imagination. As a storyteller, a master of animated narration, Dumas is hard to match. Also, like the colors and visuals in say, SpongeBob Squarepants, Dumas’ word paintings in its settings were so vibrant, so tangible, that I can forgive improbabilities and allusions I’ll never understand.

Captain Pamphile, a Provençal sea captain, captures wild animals to sell to Parisians for their menageries of curious creatures. He takes the role of a beast to his crew and a ferocious predator to the animals in order to serve a market of idle fashionistas. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera said "Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals." Dumas lets the narration of events make his point that cruelty, especially toward the vulnerable, is a noxious mix of greed, egotism, and willful stupidity.

Darkly funny episodes reek of the rough and tumble humor of late 18^th and early 19^th century. Coarse incidents will strike us modern readers as harsh, making us recall that the past really is a different country, with a different language and mores. But the violence also impressed me like an American tall tale, so improbable that it is impossible to get upset. It would be like getting outraged over Roadrunner blowing up Wile E. Coyote yet again.

Oxford World Classics and New York Review of Books reissue fairly well-known classics in beautiful editions with informative forwards and notes, but Hesperus Classics reissues minor works by great authors (like this one) or unjustly neglected works by forgotten authors. Reading in general but reading neglected fiction in particular appeals to the snob in me. I’ve read stories by Conan Doyle that don’t star Sherlock Holmes! And you haven’t! Nyah-nyah!

European RC #4

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light under German Occupation, 1940-1944 - Ronald C. Rosbottom

I’ve figured that I’ve read enough in recent years about war and its effects on society and individual soldiers and civilians. As I grow older, I find that I’m more easily appalled at the terrible lingering effects of war on survivors and less able to shake off the contemptuous sadness that politicians don’t seem to get smarter or less irresponsible.

However, when I saw this book sitting in a little library, I couldn’t stop myself. I felt curious about what happens when the worst totalitarians in the world occupy a city known for its openness, tolerance, and liberty. Surprise, surprise – the Nazis really liked the whorehouses, drinking, and looting and plundering, but they did everything they could make daily life impossible and hazardous for the French. They controlled time with curfews. They controlled urban space with no-go zones and barriers. They had a made a of rules and regulations that made everybody guilty of some infraction if the authorities bothered to look. They controlled behavior like eating with shortages, ration cards, and long lines for food. A Latvian once told me the Soviet strategy was to keep people off-balance by making mere errands a huge tiring hassle, so people would have no energy left for protest.

Rosbottom describes the collective trauma imposed on the French by the Germans. Deprived of information from the outside world, the French were starved for facts about Allied progress in other theaters. The French had no idea how long the Occupation was going to last, so they felt the uncertainty that contributes directly to anxiety and depression. Over time, in daily life it was often difficult to say where the boundary between collaboration and adaptation to a new reality was set. This is an interesting theme as our country wrestles with the lines between “collusion” and “cooperation” and “conspiracy.”

He also tells about local police and authorities playing a major role in, among other things, the implementation of the Holocaust. A special squad of French police went hunting for Jewish people to deport. And the French authorities were efficient in the summer 1942 round-up of Jewish people who were imprisoned at Vélodrome d'Hiver and transported from there to death camps.

Rosbottom arranges the book both thematically and chronologically.  He did research with printed materials and looked for perspectives in many different interviews. In addition to soldiers, politicians, members of the resistance movement and ordinary civilians, he gives capsule views of a number of well-known artists and writers such as Picasso, Camus, Cocteau, and Duras, whose work and production were involved in examining the occupation. Rosbottom is a professor of French, not a historian, so his interests and expertise are more related to the humanities, not economics or sociology.

Readers who want background to Albert Camus's The Plague and Anthony Beevor's Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949 may find this book interesting. Although many readers will find Rosbottom’s prose easy enough to comprehend, readers who prefer history written novelistically a la Erik Larsen should stay away.

The Fate of the Malous

French title: Le Destin des Malou

Published: 1947

Englished: Denis George, 1962

The Fate of the Malous – Georges Simenon

Call nobody happy till he’s dead. Just because a mogul like Eugene Malou is rich and respected doesn’t mean he’s going to slip away peacefully of old age. This novel opens with Malou blowing his brains out on the doorstep of the well-appointed manse of Count Adrien Estier, who can’t bail him out this time. The suicide triggers a family crisis mainly because also blown to bits is their lifestyle. Malou has left in family in financial straits.

Alain Malou, the youngest son, plays the shuttlecock between his mother, selfish and indifferent, and his sister Corine equally self-absorbed. Alain faces the prospect of making a living, an abrupt change from his previously carefree youth. He lands a job in a print shop after fleeing his sister and seeing his mother off to Paris.

In search of the backstory to his father, Alain looks up some of his father’s companions. They reveal his father’s fragile dreams. Alain comes to understand that his family’s peaks and valleys were caused by his father’s alternate booms and busts in the building business. He discovers that his father was probably not an upright man. But for all his mistakes, lapses of judgement, and sharp business practices, he was a man, especially in Simenon’s and his generation’s terms. That is, he was a risk-taker, damn the consequences. Plus, he was the only one in his family, with the unthinking son, selfish wife, and self-absorbed daughter that knew what love could be. The father’s death broke the family up, but they were never a family, emotionally cohesive, in the first place.

But the world of the present brings Alain to a fork in the road. Due to personal animosities, he is fired at the print shop. He realizes he has to leave the flat, dull, provincial town for Paris. And there he must strive to become a man, like his father.

This subdued novel examines an ordinary life. Doing so, it very typical of the roman durs – the hard novels that scrutinize characters in a liminal space, a transitional stage, usually brought on by a death but sometimes by a change of neighborhood or a new neighbor.

Other Non-Maigret Novels by Simenon

Talatala

Aunt Jeanne

Tropic Moon

Dirty Snow

The Survivors

Aboard the Aquitaine

The Glass Cage

The Grandmother

Act of Passion

The Old Man Dies

European RC #3

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge

French title: Le Président

Year published: 1958

Year Englished: 1961, by Daphne Woodward

The Premier - Georges Simenon

Ex-Premier Augustine, who is designated only by his first name throughout, has retired to his small estate of Les Ebergues after a political defeat so crushing that he swore never to set foot in Paris again. Although surrounded by police protection and a small but vigilant staff, he lives in both physical and psychological isolation. Of the people he grew up with, he is one of three still above ground. Since at 82 his health is out of his control and death is always hovering, he puts his individual freedom of judgement above everything. He undertakes to write his memoirs, which he hides around the library like a child who has scrawled “Sometimes I hate mama” on a memo pad and jams into the recesses of a couch.

Afraid to admit it to himself, he fears the loss of all influence in the political life of the country. He perceives, however, a glimmer of hope brought about by a potential change of coalition government that may bring his former chief of staff, Chalamont, to the summit of power. Augustine has kept a confession in Chalamont’s own hand, one so compromising that Chalamont would have to withdraw his bid and end his career in public life in ignominy. The climax of the novel is Augustine waiting for Chalamont to visit and make a desperate appeal, thus assuring Augustine, in his vanity, that he can still make a difference in the destiny of France.

The non-Maigret novels are not for nothing called "hard novels" which have profound themes and grim conclusions. The world of politics is one filled with pettiness of mind and ambition, malicious betrayals, and, above all, mediocrity. This analysis of power, its undertones, its dark side and the less than ideal kind of people power attracts, is served up with writing always restrained and perfectly chiseled.

The Burial of M. Bouvet

French title: L'Enterrement de Monsieur Bouvet
Published: 1952
Englished:  1958, Eugene MacCown

The Burial of M. Bouvet – Georges Simenon

On a quiet morning in a torrid summer, a bourgeois gentleman, M. Bouvet, dies suddenly while idly going over the paperbacks of a used bookstore on the edge of the Seine, not far from his apartment in the Quai de la Tournelle.

The old man died silently, without complaint, without struggle, looking at pictures, listening to the voices in the market, the chirping of sparrows, the honking of scattered taxis.

I can think of plenty of worse ways to go. « Une belle mort », indeed.

The police, with so few personnel due to the summer holidays, intend to complete a death certificate of an ordinary old man who lived alone, quietly, in an apartment house watched over by a loyal concierge.

However, by chance M. Bouvet was photographed, post-mortem at the scene, by a foreign student from the US, and the portrait is published by the newspapers. The wide dissemination of the portrait of M. Bouvet will attract a series of characters who bring to light the unsettled past of the old man.

A middle-aged woman comes forward, saying the dead man is her husband, Samuel Marsh, an American citizen, who deserted her twenty years before, ostensibly to leave to run a gold mine in the Congo. Marsh’s former business partner in the Congo brings forward evidence that Marsh's identity was false.

Mildly intrigued, the authorities assign Inspector Beaupère to figure out who M. Bouvet was. He digs up the fact that Gaston Lamblot, scion of the rich Roubaix family, disappeared mysteriously after a promising university career. After being involved in a fraud case, Lamblot lived with a prostitute and moved in anarchist circles before World War II.

But there are still deeper wells the Inspector must plumb. His investigation reveals sequential identities of the seemingly typical M. Bouvet. The Inspector and we readers can examine the warp and woof of various woven lives. M. Bouvet has left a whole life behind numerous times. Only after he’s dead are the strands put together again in some kind of order.

Bouvet wanted to be totally free, evading all of life’s entanglements and hassles. This theme of the man who is willing to give up everything and carve out a niche where he can live on his own terms appears in many of Simenon's novels. Ridiculous or terrible or weird mysteries wrap and hide lives in the most ordinary appearances.

In his understated style, Simenon gives descriptions of inconsequential events and the psychology of ordinary people. He evokes a Paris overwhelmed by the summer heat. He brings to life the concierge attached to the lonely old man due to her alcoholic husband; the conscientious investigator who attempts to hide his humility and intimidation when dealing with member of higher social classes.

Starts slow, but comes to a relentless finish.

Other Non-Maigret Novels by Simenon

Talatala

Aunt Jeanne

Tropic Moon

Dirty Snow

The Survivors

Aboard the Aquitaine

The Glass Cage

The Grandmother

Act of Passion

The Old Man Dies

A New Lease of Life

French title: Une Vive Comme neuve

Year Published:  1951

Englished: Joanna Richardson, 1963

A New Lease of Life  - Georges Simenon

The main character fits Simenon’s typical main character: male, early middle age, low level job, alienated from self and others, disliked. Maurice Dudon breaks up the tedium of his monotonous life every Friday night by indulging in sleazy predilections. He peculates the petty cash, visits a quiet brothel, and goes to confession. He feels bad about the sins of stealing and fornication so he enters the confessional with morose pleasure.

His feeling that something bad is going to happen does indeed happen. One Friday, after confession, Dudon is struck by a car, a punishment he figures as long overdue. In hospital – a liminal space where transitions, wanted and unwanted, are inevitable – he finds the new lease on life of the title.

He feels unaccountably mischievous and playful. He smiles in the realization that he is in the hands of the best doctors of a luxury clinic.  A rich vintner was the driver of the car that hit him, He fears his victim’s knowledge that the vintner was with his mistress. The vintner, really on the spot, will also offer our hero a position of responsibility, much better paid. As if this were not heaven enough, our Dudon catches the romantic interest of his nurse, Anne-Marie. She is a Simenonian Ideal Woman: easy-going, caring, sensual, and buxom.

Released from the hospital, with a new job and new honey-bunny, Dudon finds everything peachy. But, insensibly, due to the effects of his head injury, he suffers chronic headache, dizziness, fogginess. During a rest cure, he faces a crisis that forces him to choose either domestic bliss or prostitute-based guilt.

Gosh, I wonder which he'll pick.

My Reviews of Other Non-Maigret Novels by Simenon

Talatala

Aunt Jeanne

Tropic Moon

Dirty Snow

The Survivors

Aboard the Aquitaine

The Glass Cage

The Grandmother

Act of Passion

The Old Man Dies

European RC #8

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2016.

Published: 1931

French title: Au Rendez-Vous des Terre-Neuvas

Englished: 2014, David Coward

The Grand Banks Café - Georges Simenon

After three months at sea, a trawler returns to its home port of Fécamp in northern France. Shortly after the return, the captain, Octave Fallut, is found dead by strangulation in one of the harbor basins. The wireless operator of the trawler, Pierre Le Clinche, barely twenty years old, is the person of interest since he was seen prowling around the boat on the day of the killing.

An old friend of Chief Inspector Maigret, Jorissen, a teacher at Quimper, writes an appeal to Maigret to establish the innocence of the young telegrapher. Once in Fécamp, Maigret settles in at the Grand Banks Café, a hangout of sailors. Once again, we have Maigret trying to crack open a closed society in order to figure out events and feelings that lead up to a murder. Slowly Maigret uncovers unreasoning lust and vengeful anger that caused the murder.

Like many of the early, Depression-era, Maigret novels, this one has a heavy atmosphere. Somber but not as depressing as Maigret and the Yellow Dog (also written in 1931). There are various women characters, with Madame Maigret and the widow Bernard providing stability and domesticity, Le Clinche’s fiancé Marie Léonnec providing loyalty and forgiveness, and Adèle Noirhomme for idiot lust and chaos.  Maigret is true to himself. He listens to conversations, taking in the atmosphere of the harbor and its denizen. He is part anthropologist and part psychologist as he bores into the complexity of relationships and interior struggles.

Maigret also delves into the heart of France during the period between the wars. His focus is on his own people, people with little, who toil to get by. This is the France of small shops, cafés on every street corner, and artisans (such as rope makers) whose day you’d have thought passed long before 1930.

Simenon loved the sea so his stories set near locks, on barges and in small fishing ports are worth reading. He’s great with atmosphere, which is also a tribute to the translator. David Coward has also translated Alexandre Dumas, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, and the Marquis de Sade. It was a good idea for Penguin to commission new translations of these classic mysteries.

The Man on the Bench in the Barn

French title: La Main

Year Published: 1968

Englished:  Moura Budberg, 1970

The Man on the Bench in the Barn – Georges Simenon

Georges Simenon wrote 13 novels with American settings and characters, nine with the point of view of Americans and four from that of foreigners or new immigrants. Often they are bleak tales, about and for middle-aged readers whose illusions are getting smaller in the rear view mirror.

This novel starts with a bash in the burbs. The Sanders spend the weekend with their friends the Dodds. The two couples attend a party organized by the Ashbridges. Enough alcohol flows to cloud everybody’s judgement. Donald Dodd is boozily troubled at spying old college chum Ray Sanders in the arms of the hostess.

The two couples face hazard in a blizzard while driving home. Ray gets lost in the snowstorm. Donald goes out to look for him. Brought down low by fatigue and alcohol, he prefers to take refuge on a bench in a barn. One never knows when a liminal space will pop up in Simenon novel, but while sitting and smoking, Donald’s train of thought becomes confused…or clarified.

It comes to him that his friendly relationship with Ray is in fact only a disguised envy for another man who is financially successful and sits on the receiving end of life’s bounty. Meanwhile he, Donald, with a modest income, feels bound to his wife and to his job merely by habit, by necessity, driven to pay for crap he doesn’t even want. In a boozy haze, he feels hatred and envy for his neighbor Ray and persuades himself that it is okay to let Ray die by not going to his rescue.

A couple days later Ray’s body found. The police speculate that the fell from the top of a rock. Donald does not feel less responsible for his death. He constantly thinks about what he should have done to save his old buddy. His guilt, however, doesn’t stop him from making Ray’s widow into his mistress.

His wife is a model of consolation. But Donald’s fantasies haunt him. His guilt festers as he becomes obsessed with the notion that his wife knows his culpability and is looking at him askance. His worried mind deteriorates. His health begins to falter.

Simenon explores emptiness that must be filled with obsessions and a scary detachment from reality that must moored by going through the motions of daily life.

Other Non-Maigret Novels by Simenon

Talatala

Aunt Jeanne

Tropic Moon

Dirty Snow

The Survivors

Aboard the Aquitaine

The Glass Cage

The Grandmother

Act of Passion

The Old Man Dies

Classics #7

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2016.

French title: Oncle Charles s'est enferme

Year Published: 1942

Translation: Howard Curtis, 1987

Uncle Charles has Locked Himself in – Georges Simenon

Uncle Charles is a typical Simenonian hero. An unassuming bookkeeper who works for his brother, he has no intimate relationships since he rarely speaks and feels happiest at his solitary hobbies of photography and fixing small devices.  His easy-going wife and three working-girl daughters take him utterly for granted, just as the family of ingrates did to the hero in M. Vonde Vanishes.

One day on returning home, Uncle Charles locks himself in the attic and in a note tells his family to leave him in peace. He has laid in a stock of provisions so he feels he won’t be disturbed.

Surprised, but not excessively so, the rest of the family then implements Strategy One and Two of families facing a crisis: Do nothing. Hope it blows over.

Family life observes its usual course, with the lazy and lax housewife and the three daughters, concerned above all with their own lives. They too have locked themselves in, concerned only with selfish, transitory, mediocre goals in day to day life. One doesn’t blame Uncle Charles for wanting a bit of vacation from their self-centeredness. A Simenonian hero always reaches points where he’s got to escape humdrum existence and stoke what’s left of his self-control and persistence.

After several days, during which each daughter half-heartedly attempts to get him out of his seclusion, his well-off brother, owner of a cannery, comes to reason him out of his reclusiveness. In fact, Henri suspects that Charles has something on him (Henri) and needs to talk him (chuck) around in order to minimize damage to his (Henri’s) life.

In the reveal, Simenon shows us that life goes on even in a crisis and that when families are examined closely strange things are revealed. Well worth reading, with both the realism of The Glass Cage and the unflinching view of the horror of ordinary people as in The Family Lie. People are only human, Simenon seems to say, so it’s not reasonable to expect them to get out of their rut of acting on ‘What’s in it for me’ for more than two minutes at a time. People can rise to the occasion on occasion, but to expect most to be smarter, braver, wiser than they can be is just dreaming the impossible dream.

My reviews of Other Non-Maigret Novels by Simenon

Talatala

Aunt Jeanne

Tropic Moon

Dirty Snow

The Survivors

Aboard the Aquitaine

The Glass Cage

The Grandmother

Act of Passion

The Old Man Dies

European RC #4

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2016.

French title: Malempin

First published: 1940

Translation: Isabel Quigley, 1978

The Family Lie - Georges Simenon

In this short non-Maigret novel, Dr. Malempin must come to terms with his parent’s sins, big and small, while his young son battles diphtheria. The child’s illness has derailed family plans for a vacation in the South.

While keeping vigil over his son, the doctor is struck by the child’s unfathomable expression and wonders what memories of the infection the child will retain. This thought causes Dr. Malempin to reflect on his own past, how his own memories were formed, the parts his parents played in making those memories. Could the same process be unfolding in his son?

This train of thought, in turn, causes him to reflect deeply and turn to journaling as a way to think about his past. He goes over in memory the story of young Edouard, in the countryside, as a very young child. He feels vaguely his mother and her family’s discontent when Great Uncle Tesson marries a much younger woman, Elise. He recalls wondering why his parents, when visiting the rich moneylender Uncle Tesson and Elise every Sunday, seem unlike themselves, falsely sincere. His father is a small-scale farmer, his mother the daughter of a ruined notary, who feels the humiliation of having but little money and having to cozy up to a rich relative.

One day after visiting the Malempins, Great Uncle Tesson just disappears. The adult doctor cannot recall the exact circumstances of the vanishing of the unfriendly usurer.  Questioned by the police, his mother tells bald-faced lies, right in the front of young Edouard who know lies when he hears them. Frightened that the child has something on them and will talk unwisely to the police, his parents ship to Edouard to his Aunt Elise. Though his stay was to be limited to the time the investigators were on the case, he continued to live with his aunt, to whom he was attracted in various ways. Yeah, those ways too, Simenon never flinched from disturbing realities (see the abuse in The Little Saint).

So, this novel examines family secrets and a man’s gradual understanding of adult behavior that seemed so odd to a child. He considers the past’s influences on his own behavior. The doctor’s examination of his own childhood enables him to better understand his loveless marriage and his children. Simenon emphasizes the sharp-eyed but limited point of view of a child and the tenuous trickiness of memory for adults. We readers recall how acutely concentrated our powers of observation were when we were kids, but we realize we didn’t understand because we lacked experience of the adult world, with its mysterious  reactions and unspoken assumptions. Childhood experience shapes us without our knowledge, to affect our entire lives as adults.

In Simenon’s ‘hard novels’ – aka non-Maigret psychological thrillers – motivated by one of life’s usual crises (illness, accident, crime or family members forgetting one’s birthday), an often alienated protagonist must evaluate his daily life. Sometimes he choose another way of living but most often it’s only realization that something important happened. Sometimes he chooses a healthier way, sometimes neurosis keeps him in his rut.

My only gripe was that going unexplained were references to French high and low culture of the early 1940s. Too bad publishers were too cheap to add at the end a couple pages of notes that explained allusions that nobody in the non-French world could be expected to understand. Not translated for almost 40 years since publishers and translators were unsure of its sales, this sad novel is not for everyone but for the rare reader who, like Simenon, accepts inevitability, accepts what will naturally occur in this delightful and maddening world – and does not live "crushed by the present or fearful of the future."

My Review of Other Non-Maigret Novels by Simenon

Talatala

Aunt Jeanne

Tropic Moon

Dirty Snow

The Survivors

Aboard the Aquitaine

The Glass Cage

The Grandmother

Act of Passion

The Old Man Dies

European RC #2

I read this book for the European Reading Challenge 2016.

The Devils of Loudon – Aldous Huxley

We remember Huxley nowadays for the dystopia Brave New World. But he wrote many other fiction and non-fiction books, one of which was this history of religious and sexual obsession in 17th century France. Huxley’s theme is that that the evils we ascribe to religious intolerance are instead a product of human nature. That political bosses in any society manipulate ideas - fear, superstition, self-interest, patriotism, etc. -  and their dissemination in order to maintain their power and access to the other goodies like prestige, offices, awards, travel, prostitutes, and luxury food.

… Few people now believe in the Devil; but very many enjoy behaving as their ancestors behaved when the Fiend was a reality as unquestionable as his Opposite Number. In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils. This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good. And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism and true religion.

So the Communists are consigned to the trashcan of history but other hobgoblins - liberals, inflationists, the Federal Reserve, Blacks, Muslims, terrorists – are invented and utilized to scare the rubes.

Huxley gets across what a weird century the 17^th was, with regard to its mix of devout religion and unbridled sexuality. In 1632 an entire Ursuline convent in the village of Loudun was apparently possessed by the devil. That is, hysteria was contagious and the fame and wealth that came from all the attention was congenial. The girls and women accused a priest, Urban Grandier, of being in league with the devil. A village cabal hated Grandier. They trumped up the charges to get him tried and burned at the stake. I had to skip the dozen of so pages that detailed his torture before he was consigned to the flames for witchcraft.

While proving that his message of the danger of the powerful oppressing the vulnerable is still relevant in an election year of 2016, Huxley inserts essays about many other topics of interest, such as Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (“an absurd and charming book”); bovarism, the glamorized estimate of oneself; and the shift of  the way of thinking of the medieval world to our more recognizable modern world.

When I read Huxley, I feel I am with a knowledgeable and witty but down to earth thinker. I don’t mind running to the dictionary about every other page. His ideas about Vendanta and Zen went rather over my head, as I don’t think I have the kind of mind to be an adequate mystic. For me, Huxley is rather too broad-minded about ESP and PK, too.

European RC #1

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.

Who needs the overheated and hysterical and so frickin’ long Dostoyevsky when we can read Simenon? I found this novella a pleasure, from Jeanne's first slug of brandy  (for courage) at the train station to the tentatively cheerful ending in which people settle for what life tosses their way.

Act of Passion

Act of Passion – Georges Simenon, tr. Louise Varese 9781590173855

During and after WWII, Georges Simenon, creator of homicide detective Maigret, wrote stand-alone novels s such as The Engagement, Red Lights, Tropic Moon, The Man Who Watched Trains, not to mention the profoundly unsettling analogy for the German occupation of France, Dirty Snow. 

The stories are often the same: a man is so alienated from himself and society that he feels like a robot, just going through the motions of daily life. Some event brings internal and external pressures to the bursting point. In Act of Passion, Dr. Charles Alavoine, haunted by urges for sex and a sense of futility, meets Martine, filled with self-loathing due to sexual abuse in childhood. Something has to  give.

This novel is told in the first-person, in the form of a letter to the examining magistrate from the perp. The perp does not ask for forgiveness, but seeks the understanding of another man who is able to understand the feelings as the motive of his act. I can think of only one other novel where Simenon uses the first-person, In Case of Emergency, in which a lawyer explains his existential rage and defiance of conventions, especially as enforced by fussy mothers and wives that take exception to affairs with a female wild-child (played by Bridget Bardot in the movie).

Act of Passion is well-worth reading. A bit longer than his novels usually are, he presents three clearly delineated characters (husband, wife and lover), suggesting the roots of their strengths and weaknesses.