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.

Happy New Year!

The Magician

French title: Antoine et Julie

First published: 1953

Translation: Helen Sebba, 1954

In Simenon’s existential thrillers, or non-Maigret noir downers if you prefer, his main characters are often lonely. Emotionally flat and socially inept, they seek connection to others in dysfunctional ways. In Justice, a delinquent seeks suspect companionship among low lives. In A New Lease on Life, alienation drives an accountant to seek the shabby carnality of prostitutes. In The Man on the Bench in the Barn, a middle-aged lawyer has an ill-advised fling with the widow of the man that he thinks he’s killed.

But in The Magician, when the main character drinks, he chases “that contact, that way of looking at humanity and of feeling at one with it.” He reaches the impaired conclusion that people don't commit suicide because there comes a moment, “if you know how to manage things, when it is no longer necessary.” Antoine's “managing things” – i.e., drinking himself stupid - gets out of control and he has one of those miserable experiences – such as an accident, an arrest – that finally persuade alcoholics that they have hit bottom and better stop drinking. The precise writing makes this one a forceful if sad novel, especially to those interested in a literary treatment of the greed of alcoholics, examples of craving and triggers to drink, and how alcoholism damages not only the drinker but at least three or four other people around him.

Married in their forties, Antoine and Julie live in an apartment on rue Daru in Paris. Their first years of marriage were less than idyllic since Julie's mother did not like her son-in-law, whose conjuring and prestidigitation she despised as professions unfit for an adult male. She claimed Antoine  married Julie for her money, since Julie was overweight, middle-aged, and prone to anxiety.

But death solves problems like this. With the mother-in-law in her grave, you’d think things could be hunky-dory. They don't roll in money but he makes enough for them to make their modest ends meet. The lack of money is not the problem. The problem that life presents is that like a lot of alcoholics, Antoine knows perfectly well that he is one of those people who had better not drink, because when they do bad things happen. For him, two are too many and six are not enough. But as he works at night usually, all the chances are too inviting to stop in a bar, whistle up a gin or a cognac, and repeat the drunk's logic, "Hell, if I feel this good right now with just a couple, I may as well make a night of it."

In his cups, Antoine makes bad decisions. He hangs out with Dagobert, who likes to assert, “We’re all bastards,” just the good news alcoholics need to hear. He lends the worthless Dagobert money that he will never see again. He gets home late and hassles the highly-strung Julie with the dicky ticker. He claims that he is unhappy and pains his wife with unjust reproaches, blaming everybody and everything but himself for his problems. Of course, like lots of drunks, he feels remorse the next day. But neither his monotonous drinking nor nervy Julie’s heart problem stop him from drinking again after only a short period of abstinence.

On Christmas Eve, Julie notices that she has no heart medicine left. She asks Antoine to go to the pharmacy and fetch her the medication. Stuff happens - as the old song goes, "there's a thousand swingin' doors gonna let you in" -  the upshot of which you can guess if you’ve read the other existential thrillers listed below. And Antoine ends up being the kind of man “who never drinks and never asks questions.”

Georges Simenon, thanks to his immense talent and subdued writing, looks at the ordinary and makes it important.  

Other Non-Maiget Psychological-Existential Thrillers

Talatala

The Family Lie

Aunt Jeanne

The Man on the Bench in the Barn

Tropic Moon

Dirty Snow

The Burial of M. Bouvet

Uncle Charles has Locked Himself In

The Survivors

A New Lease of Life

Aboard the Aquitaine

The Glass Cage

The Grandmother

Act of Passion

The Old Man Dies

The White Horse Inn

Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses

Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses - Georges Simenon

ISBN-10: 0156551594

A century-old family firm once rolled in profits from manufacturing biscuits that Maigret remembers as having tasted of cardboard. Times and public tastes have inevitably changed. The firm should have gone out of business long-ago but for infusions of cash from heiresses the sons of the family have married.

But one night the eldest son, head of the family is murdered in his bed.

When Maigret comes in to investigate he has to fight three problems. The family puts up a wall of silence. Though no charges are pressing, they hire an obnoxious lawyer who seizes every chance to get in Maigret’s face. A young whippersnapper of an examining magistrate involves himself too deeply in the investigation and actually wants to supervise Maigret, who is only two years from retirement.

Generally the mystery is dusty in atmosphere and dour in tone, but the black sheep daughter of the family provides lively relief and not just because she works dressed in a dinner jacket and monocle in nightclub for women of Sapphic and cross-dressing inclinations. While worrying about his advancing age (a marker of the late Maigret novels of the 1960s), Maigret gets to the bottom of the mess.

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