Subtler, almost invisible

Sometimes, as if carelessly, Michel's and Louise's looks met. The warned each other not to stay too long. In fact, their eyes touched, as lightly as birds, while an expression of almost childish contentment spread across the Rumanian's face as he hurriedly bent over his plate.

The change on the young girl's face was subtler, almost invisible; it wasn't joy. There was no sparkle in it, it was more like a look of serenity and satisfaction.

It was as though she had matured, as though she suddenly felt a great potential richness inside her.

I'd almost forgotten how much I love Simenon. My reading of late has felt pretty blah; maybe that throws Simenon into relief. I love Simenon!

I loved Account Unsettled! I love that I found this book in Prague! I love that it's my daughter who pulled me into this shop for some inexplicable reason! I love this book's funky smell! I love its atrocious cover!

The cover — the description in combination with the illustration — might lead you to believe that this book is about a crime of passion with a woman at its source. But there is no passion in this crime; it's very cold. And the woman has nothing to do with it.

This 1953 novel is one of Simenon's romans durs and does not feature Maigret. It opens in Liège, and then quite unexpectedly shifts in time and space to Arizona some decades later. From the claustrophobia of a house marked by hunger and chills to the gluttonous emptiness of resort in a vast sweaty desert. A study in contrasts.

Page after page we have been waiting for Elie, a poor, ugly Polish-Lithuanian Jew pursuing a doctorate in mathematics, to gun down Michel, the handsome, charming, womanizing Jewish Rumanian of means.

It's not a matter of jealousy, it's justice, Elie convinces himself. But did Michel even ever give him a second thought?

What is it those eyes want to say?

Another Simenon novel, another bullet to my head.

The Hand, by Georges Simenon, is true to form. Ah, the mind games old married couples play.

"You're going through a crisis typical of almost all men your age..."

If she thinks that, she's mistaken. I know myself. It isn't the infatuation of a man growing old. Besides, I am not in love. Neither am I plunging into some kind of pathological sexuality.

I remain composed, attentive to what is happening inside me and around me and am alone, no doubt, in knowing that there is nothing new in my innermost thoughts, except that I have finally dared to look at them in the light of day.

So, what is it those eyes want to say?

"I pity you..."

This novel might have been as effectively called The Eyes. The eyes are his wife's, the hand his mistress's. Her eyes are a mystery to him — what do they see? — full of curiosity and judgment.

The hand, however, is a compulsion, entirely passive but under his male gaze beckoning. The novel is barely about that hand, but trust the male to choose to make it about that hand.

The Hand starts with a snowstorm. One of their party is lost to the elements. Donald Dodd meanwhile loses his bearings.

"The important thing," my father used to say, "is to make the right choice to begin with..."

He was talking about choosing not only a wife but a profession, a way of life, a way of thinking.

I thought I had chosen. I have done my best. I have worn myself out doing my best.

And, little by little, I have wound up hoping to see approval in Isabel's eyes.

What I had chosen, in the end, was a witness, a benevolent witness, someone who, with a glance, would let me understand that I was keeping myself on the right path.

This is quite a good novel. At under 200 pages, it's an easy diversion but still thought-provoking. I've read enough Simenon to know when to read him; one must take care, as it can send one's soul flying into dangerous territory.

I am at times tired of hearing how the poor hero has been emasculated and has no control over his life, a victim of the various women in his life, fighting societal convention to prove himself to be more than an empty shell. Sometimes I want to read those women's stories.

I marvel that, for all the hundreds of books Simenon wrote, any novel of his could hope to feel original. The Hand is a slow burn with a great pay-off. I should've seen it coming, but I didn't see it coming.

She heaved a sigh, as on every evening, to mark the end of her day and the beginning of a night's rest.

A kind of unimportant nebula

According to the back cover copy of my trashy-looking mass market paperback (exactly as pictured here),

The Accomplices is Simenon's powerful study in guilt and obsession — the portrait of a man destroyed by the consequences of sexual bondage.

That's a simplistic reading. Joseph Lambert is not a sexual obsessive per se. He lives an ordinary life. He wants to escape his mundane life, his boring wife, his predictable routine.

He was fed up with himself, fed up with being a man.

The novel opens with Lambert driving through the rainy countryside with his mistress, his secretary Edmonde. He doesn't have both hands on the wheel, and his attention is not on the road. By page 2, he has caused a deadly crash — a schoolbus full of children goes up in flames. The story follows Lambert's trajectory through guilt and self-destruction in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.

One intuits immediately that the occupants of the car are the accomplices of the title.

Though they were not in love and had never acted as if they were, there was nevertheless an intimacy between them, an intimacy of another kind that bordered on complicity.

Their complicity is noted a few times, but Edmonde's complete silence about the incident makes one wonder whether she's aware of what happened at all. Doesn't complicity require some form of intent? Is she so cold or so oblivious that she does not recognize it as a tragedy at all?

What did Edmonde think about what had happened, about the way he had behaved? What did she think bout him? Had it been anyone else, he would have asked. But her — he dared not.

Why?

Was it because what existed between them was on a plane different from that of ordinary life, of life as one conceives it, as one lives it, as one wants it to be?

It was somewhat as if, at a given moment, for no apparent reason, they exchanged a signal and then escaped.

He was not modest in her presence either. They entered a different realm, a realm which resembled that of childhood rather than that of evil.

There are times when it seems the whole town is complicit with Lambert. Despite the occasional marital indiscretion, he is, on the whole, an upstanding businessman, and nobody suspects him of playing a role in the disaster. Nobody wants to suspect him, nobody wants their routine disrupted, their humdrum, provincial existence upended.

Except maybe Lambert himself.

He felt within him a refusal to return to ordinary life, and he plunged almost fiercely into a universe where all that mattered was the quivering of his senses.

The universe then drifted away until it was only a kind of unimportant nebula. Objects lost their weight, human beings were merely tiny or grotesque puppets, and everything to which one usually attached value became ridiculous. All that remained in a shrunken, warm, enveloping, an kindly world was the pounding of the blood in their arteries, a symphony which at first was vague and diffuse, then gradually became sharper, and finally concentrated in their sex organs.

There's a very specific thing in The Accomplices that put me in mind of a very specific thing in Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton. Lambert's pursuit of "the click" — that's what Edmonde enables. It's a mental switch, a cognitive break from reality.

In Hamilton that break is tied up with mental illness, and blurred by sex and alcohol; sex acts as a trigger, evidence of all the dirt and filth the character needs to break from. In Simenon the break is pursued, and the pursuit of sex is a catalyst to achieving that break, kind of like the ultimate, transcendent orgasm, only it's not sexual per se — it's sensual, fully inhabiting one's senses. It mimics a return to childhood, a detachment from reality, an absence of responsibility.

It's taken me ages to read this slim little novel. I've made several false starts on this one over the couple years since I acquired it. My copy is very used, and very pungent with old-book smell. It's also sticky. Twice in the past week I've left home without a book, without this book. One might take this for a sign of illness. Or a sign of avoidance. I find reading Simenon takes a certain strength, a willingness to abandon oneself to the questionable morality Simenon probes at, book after book after book. But it's a very rewarding interior journey.

On not buying books

Yesterday for lunch I went to the bookstore. Food for thought, food for the soul. Usually I just like to browse, just being in a bookstore brings me comfort (and I'm lucky to have recently found a non-big-box-chain store near my office — I blame the shifting streets of Old Montreal, like mischievous Hogwarts staircases, for keeping it hidden from me for so long), but yesterday, uncharacteristically, I splurged on impulse.

I have tried to keep in check the acquisition of books, but when displaying my spoils back at the office (just three books), a coworker, having witnessed me purchase books on two occasions and at other times open packages of books, called me on this delusion of mine.

Since September,

• The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle — because a review made me want it, it's Lovecraftian
• Le Chat, Georges Simenon — to practice my French
• The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon — because I've been planning to read it for years, so finally now
• The Door, Magda Szabó — because I wanted Iza's Ballad (because the name) but it wasn't available, and NYRB Classics books are beautiful
• Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau — because it's exercises in style, so I can argue that it's related to my work
• The Familiar, Volume 2, Mark Z Danielewski — because volume 1 was exhilarating, and it's fascinating as an object
• The Hand, Georges Simenon — because I'd never heard of it, and since it's not available in Canada it's that much more precious
• The Invisible Library, Genevieve Cogman — because it was on all sorts of books-to-watch-for lists and it cost less than 2 dollars, and it might be about a library
• The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville — because Miéville is one of the few authors about whom I feel I must own his entire oeuvre
• The Loney, Andrew Michael Hurley — because I had it on a list somewhere, I don't know why
• Monday Starts on Saturday, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky — because now available in English, plus it's an excellent title
• So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, Patrick Modiano — because I'd never heard of it, and I felt a connection to Modiano this summer, and it was shelved in the thriller section
• The Vegetarian, Han Kang — because I've been wanting to see what the fuss is about, but it wasn't available at my library, and I know I can hand it off to someone afterward

And before September, the last time I purchased a book was August, and before that was June. If you don't count the travel guide I picked up in July, along with some other vacation-reading material.

That's not counting the books I've purchased as gifts for other people, which typically occasion an oh-I'll-just-pick-up-a-little-something-for-myself-then-too moment, which helped contribute to the above.

Some of the above books were rationalized in a my-birthday-is-coming-soon way, and then an it-was-just-my-birthday-so-of-course-I-should-treat-myself way.

I'm proud to be using the library more regularly this year (quite suddenly they have a decent selection of ebooks), and when I'm hankering for something new I'm likely to browse NetGalley review copy offerings. At least some of the books listed above are ebooks (for which I'll rarely allow myself to spend more $5). I have not listed here the free ebooks I've acquired.

But believe me when I say it's not a spending problem so much as a space problem. I've become adept at slipping books in and overlooking them mentally; physically, it's a bit more challenging. Surely I'm a victim of book creep — the steady but so-slow-as-to-be-almost-imperceptible advance of books from designated shelves and corners onto most surfaces of my living space.

Me not buying books? Not very good at it.

A bumblebee in a glass of beer

And they went on staring at him, examining this fat man who was too hot and had landed in their bar like a bumblebee in a glass of beer.

That's Dr Mahé, on holiday in Porquerolles. It gets under his skin — everything about the place, and especially a young girl. An irritation, an itch he needs to scratch.

It's been a while since I read a Simenon book. Maybe I'm out of practice. Maybe I've changed. The Mahé Circle was downright unpleasant. I mean that, of course, in the best possible way. It was intense and disturbing.

The sense of restlessness, malaise, agitation were palpable from the early pages. It made me uncomfortable. I was irritated with Dr Mahé, and with everything around me while I was reading this short novel.

The object of Dr Mahé's obsession is a mere child. I don't recall this type of scenario playing out in any of the previous romans durs I've read. So while Simenon's characters are hardly admirable, they are weirdly compelling, and the reading experience can be cathartic. Not so here.

Other Simenon characters are, if not sympathetic, at least pathetic. Not so with Dr Mahé. Am I being too harshly critical? I wonder if men find him more sympathetic than I do.

Arguably, Mahé is not obsessed with the girl per se (but he is!). It is the island, it is the languor, it is his childhood, it is some life outside of his bourgeois existence. It is the need to be noticed by his wife and his mother, the need to be respected by his nephew, the need to be accepted by the islanders. The need to catch that damn fish, claim his masculinity. But above all, it's the girl.

When he had married, he had not had like other men, who leave home, a feeling of freedom.

Arguably he is punished in the end. But I don't think he repents. I don't think he acknowledges how wrong he is. Metaphorically he finally gets the fish that got away, and that fish he was after was the negation of his actual reality.

I am fascinated by stories of those who walk away, why they walk away. This book, though — it's not about that. It's about the obsession. It's not about what he's walking away from, it's about what he thinks he's walking toward. I can't get over the wrongness of it being a barely pubescent girl.

Is that the point? Was that the point when it was written in 1946? Do men readers see it as the point? Certainly that's not what the reviews I've read center on. Is that because it's really not the point of the book? Is it because Simenon's primarily male audience (that's a big leap I'm making, an assumption with no facts to back it up) is as misogynistic as he was?

Maybe when I previously binged on Simenon it was a sign that I needed to walk away from my life. Maybe now that I'm in a better place, a better headspace, I no longer have the patience for the whining, or the dilly-dallying, or the quiet complacency. I just want them to get on with it. But not with too-young girls.

The writing: spare, psychologically perceptive, precise, and oh, so evocative. An infuriatingly good book.

Elsewhere
John Banville: Simenon's Island of Bad Dreams
Tony's Reading List: Review

Excerpt.

Georges Simenon's son Pierre will be hosting a literary brunch this weekend to talk about his father's works, part of the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. (See the calendar for this and other Simenon-related events.)

Serious sociological reflection

Georges Simenon was born on Friday, February 13 — 102 years ago. Last Friday, A Different Stripe posted a great quote about it:

"It's a boy," she stammered. As for him, with a complete lack of self-restraint, he said, crying all the while:

"I shall never, never forget that you have just given me the greatest joy a woman can give a man..."

"Désiré... Listen... What time is it?"

The child had been born at ten past twelve. Élise whispered:

"Listen, Désiré... He's come into the world on a Friday the thirteenth... Nobody must know... You must beg that woman..."

And that was why, the next morning, when Désiré, accompanied by his brother Arthur as a witness, went to register the child's birth at the Town Hall, he told the clerk, with an innocent expression:

"Roger Mamelin, born at Liége, at No. 18, Rue Léopold, on Thursday 12 February 1903."

That's from Pedigree, Simenon's novelization of his own life, which I have not yet read.

As if to chide me, there's also an excellent essay by Elliott Colla on "Maigret's Jurisdiction" in the LA Review of Books:

By mapping out the emergent networks of French modernity as a sprawling social geography, Simenon turned crime writing toward serious sociological reflection. Take, for instance, the enigmatic opening lines of Pietr the Latvian: "ICPC to PJ Paris Xvzust Krakow vimontra m ghks triv psot uv Pietr-le-Letton Bremen vs tyz btolem." Maigret translates the phrase, which, we learn, is composed in the language of a continental network of police agencies. Rendered legible, the words read: "International Criminal Police Commission to Police Judiciaire in Paris: Krakow police report sighting Pietr the Latvian en route to Bremen." The next memo reads: "Polizei-Präsidium Bremen to PJ Paris: Pietr the Latvian reported en route Amsterdam and Brussels." These memos and others sketch a colorful map of overlapping networks: a rail that could take a Latvian national through Poland and Germany, then Holland and Belgium and on to France; a police network linking the national polices of these various countries in a single system of knowledge and surveillance; and, of course, a communication network linking these two systems — rail and policing — to one another in real-time.

The rest of the novel fills out this geography, and indicates just how exhilarating and terrifying it was for Simenon to witness the emergence of this interwar landscape where polyglot nations intersected and interpenetrated each other by way of crime and interdiction. Bodies, goods, and information travel back and forth across borders with near infinite possibilities. This movement is what makes crime possible, by allowing men to leave their pasts behind or to inhabit more than one identity at a time.

All those Maigret reissues to explore. And I still have a few old Simenon paperbacks that I dug up in second-hand shops lying around, unread. And there are several untranslated works also available to me to practice my French. I have a feeling I'll be getting back to basic, serious sociological reflection with Simenon very soon.

It turns on detail

There's an interesting piece by Mark Lawson in The Guardian about the long and popular tradition of European crime fiction and introducing his new radio series:

Retracing these journeys, I have made a 15-part series for BBC Radio 4, Foreign Bodies, which uses celebrated fictional detectives — from Christie's Poirot to Nesbø's Harry Hole — to explore the history of modern Europe. Cop novels are a useful tool for such a survey because the police procedural turns on detail. Novelists working in crime-free narratives have no need (and often no wish) to specify a character's job, clothes, income or family background. But because observation and evidence are crucial to the investigation of a crime – the motive for which will often rest on who someone was or what they possessed or desired – crime writers routinely provide a mass of social detail: menus, train timetables, fashion labels, shops, newspaper stories. As a result, good crime novels become a case-file of their times. The introduction of the welfare system and unemployment benefit, for example, can be traced through the comments of posh employers in Christie's mysteries. And reporters preparing to cover the impending referendum on Scottish independence would be well advised to read Ian Rankin's DCI Rebus books, which systematically depict the country's re-examination of its identity over the last 25 years.

I think this goes some way to explaining the mass appeal of crime novels. Some say we read in order to live other lives. Reading crime novels then, with their finer level of detail, may be a more immersive experience (whether for the purpose of education, entertainment, or escape).

(Certainly the attraction to my latest criminal addiction — Marek Krajewski — has less to do with the police case at hand than it does with the minutiae of 1930s Poland: the meals, the bars, the beer and the vodka, office life, marriage bureaus, tenements. All reliably filtered through an investigator who, though he often breaches ethics and good taste, has the mental discipline of a chess enthusiast and a Latin scholar.)

While Sherlock Holmes remains the detective archetype, Lawson identifies Georges Simenon (and his creation, Maigret) as the greatest influence on European crime fiction:

In Rome, Andrea Camilleri — creator of the Sicilian policeman Inspector Montalbano — pointed out to me the complete set of Maigret books on his shelves. In Berlin, one of the leading German crime-writers, Jakob Arjouni, also kept a complete Simenon close to his desk. PD James cites Simenon as a master as well, confirming a literary afterlife that perhaps validates the view of André Gide that the Belgian writer should have won the Nobel prize for literature.

Perhaps because Simenon expresses more temperament, and Maigret acts on instinct — the approach to crime is more believable than that taken by Doyle, more "human" than Holmes. My fascination with Simenon's books is by now well documented, and continually being validated.

In case of emergency

This weekend I was sucked into the vortex that is eBay, a world I haven't visited this past decade and which I'd almost forgotten existed.

The world is full of beautiful and mysterious things, I learned, and there is a treasure trove of obscure editions of Simenon titles in New South Wales, Australia.

To be someone else

And why would you start writing again?

There are things we do without any reason of for the most trivial of reasons, I said: going out and walking along the road during the rush hour and looking at people in their cars; showing up in midafternoon at the box office of a movie theater or browsing in bookshops or sitting on a balcony watching people on their way home, and repeating to yourself in you mind, why am I doing all this? why today did I walk to a bookshop or go to a movie theater and just as I got to the door decide not to go in? We do thing that have no meaning or only acquire meaning over time, perhaps because deep down we want to change our lives at the last moment, when everything appears fixed, like those roulette players who one second before the close of bets nervously shift a tower of chips, from one number to another, and then bite their fingers; because we're searching for some kind of intense experience, or because we want to be someone else, yes, to be someone else, there you have your answer: I write to be someone else.

I think that's the passage that made me love this book, Necropolis, by Santiago Gamboa. At least, it's one that made me understand that I already did, and why. Maybe these questions are obvious to most people, but I find comfort and reassurance in hearing them voiced. It's why we write, but it's why we read too.

[Y]ou know, there's a sentence in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, which says: "Man is a fickle creature of doubtful reputation, and perhaps, like a chess player, he is more interested in the process of reaching his objective than in the the objective itself," I don't know if you remember it . . . I shook my head and Supervielle continued: that's what we were discussing, my friend, that simple yet profound way of reading experience, what drives a person to make one decision and not another at a specific moment? to get off a train, get on a boat, cross the street? What there is at the end of a life is irrelevant, it isn't the result that makes a life exceptional, but the path trodden, am I being excessively obscure? There are great lives that don't get anywhere, but what does it matter? That's not a paradox.

These are the questions that Simenon asks and which his characters answer in unconventional and often unacceptable ways — it's what draws me to him. Gamboa asks them in a context that's more intellectual and emotionally safer. Our narrator is attending the International Conference on Biography and Memory in Jerusalem.

Part 1 concerns the narrator's invitation to the conference, his journey there, and some of the goings on in and around the conference setting over its first days. This is interspersed with portions of one lengthy presentation at said conference, the story of Walter de la Salle, an evangelical pastor and founder of the Ministry of Mercy, told by José Maturana, ex-con and disciple, who is found dead in his hotel room a few hours after his presentation.

Part 2 gives us 3 more of the conference presentations: The story of two brilliant but "unambitious" chess players. The tale of a Colombian man hard done by and the revenge he exacts, this story bearing more than a little resemblance to The Count of Monte Cristo. And the porn actress's reminiscences.

Part 3 kind of disintegrates. There are story fragments, including a piece presented by the narrator as part of a roundtable discussion. But these stories are not fleshed out and we are distracted by the war raging through this city, the bombs that dirupt the conference proceedings. As one character puts it, "there are times when literature has to take a back seat."

There's something unsatisfying about the structure of this book. I found all of the stories and fragments compelling but felt real disappointment that they weren't given equal weight, that these stories were treated unfairly. (As opposed to say, Cloud Atlas, where the stories balance each other, at least by page count, although I didn't care for a couple of them at all.) There's no thread tying all the disparate stories together, apart perhaps from a tunnel motif (if you stretch some metaphors) and an appreciation for chicken sandwiches.

It's part of the point of the book, I think, that things unravel — the stories, the conference, life itself. Because while the stories may be fascinating, outside is real life. All the biographical accounts are embellished or borrowed or misremembered; distilled into a narrative, they are no longer real. And as in real life, some stories make headlines, and others do not get the attention they merit.

[I]t has happened too many times in the history of thought and culture that the genius of exceptional people is unrecognized because of the stupidity and limited vision of their contemporaries, but what can we do if we live surrounded idiots and simpletons?

It's not a conventional novel, but there's a lot for bibliophiles (of the sort who pack Zweig and Schulz on holiday) to latch onto.

Maigret and Hannelore Headley

I'm at my mother's this week and not reading much at all, but I did manage to duck out of a downtown shopping-for-home-decor boutique visit to check out the used bookstore down the street.

Even though I've only ever been there a couple dozen time in my lifetime, I think of Hannelore Headley's as an institution. Most of those times were 25 years ago, in my last days of high school. Conveniently located a 10-minute walk from the school I went to and beside the park, I recall stopping there while cutting calculus and on my way out for coffee. Definitely I spent more time at Hannelore's than I did money.

It's hard to describe just how jam-packed this shop is with books. Floor to ceiling, but then you start scanning a shelf, step up on a stool, and reach for something and you realize the books are shelved two, sometimes three, deep. And then you shift your foot and knock over the 3-foot-high stack that sits on the floor in front of the shelves at the end of the aisle. Those at the ends and around corners are really the only ones in danger of toppling; the rest are so tightly packed, they prop each other up. You shuffle along sideways and bump into some boxes stacked two or three high, all crammed full of more books — fresh hauls waiting to be "shelved."

I'd given up all hope of finding anything I'd had in mind when I went in — books are organized by genre and arranged vaguely alphabetically, but I believe it uses a slightly different alpahbet than the standard English, with some of the letters swapping places and a couple extra letters thrown in — when a stack fell away to reveal the stack behind it, and three Simenon novels fell into my hands, which led me to explore the shelf beside and the boxes in front, and I found three more. My haul:

The Accomplices (1955)
Maigret Goes Home (1931)
Maigret at the Crossroads (1931)
Maigreat and the Hundred Gibbets (1931)
Maigret at the Coroner's (1952)
Maigret in Vichy (1968)

I'm most excited about The Accomplices, the only non-Maigret novel of the lot, but I love the look of Maigret Goes Home. Also, it's interesting to note that three of these books were originally published in French in 1931. Three books in the same year! And that's probably not all Simenon did that year.

Translated books

The winners of this year's Best Translated Book Award were announced last Friday, with the fiction award going to Wiesław Myśliwski's Stone Upon Stone, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston.

Not having read any of the shortlisted titles, I was faintly rooting for New Finnish Grammar, by Diego Marani and translated from the Italian by Judith Landry, because I actually had a copy of it and was planning to read it soon (in fact, I'm reading it now). My second choice would've been In Red, by Magdalena Tulli and translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston, because I've had it on my shopping list since last September.

So now I'm looking for a copy of Stone Upon Stone, only in Polish (Kamień na kamieniu), cuz it strikes me as something my mother might be interested in reading. (Only it's not so easy to find and it will not be done in time for Mother's Day.)

Here's something to chew on: it's not a new book. The novel was published in Polish in 1984. There was a movie in 1995. The English translation was published December 2010. That's a long time for a book to find an audience beyond the speakers of its original language.

I'll add a word of general praise for Bill Johnston, translator of the winning book and one of the other finalists (see above). This winter I listened to his translation of Stanisław Lem's Solaris — "the definitive edition" — and it was unputdownable (something I never thought I'd say about an audiobook). The credit for this is in part owing to the stunning source material, as well as to the impeccable narration (Allessandro Juliani). This audio experience was vastly superior to that of reading the book (and that's another thing I never thought I'd say with regard to an audiobook) — some time ago I read an English version that was translated via French. All this to say: you're doing a great job, Mr Johnston.

Note, however, that the above-mentioned award is for the best translated book. This is not synonymous with "best translation." It might help to think of it as the best book newly brought to the attention of English readers, which is a collaboration between publisher and translator and dependant on the quality of the source material. Maybe?

I read a healthy amount of translated fiction. Over the last year or so, the predominant source languages have been French and Polish — ironically languages that I am capable of reading in the original (given time, patience, and a dictionary, and acknowledging that they will be read at the expense of any subtlety and nuance in the language).

I detect occasional hiccups in phrasing. These can generally be chalked up to the fact that the books were written in another era (for example, Simenon books of the 30s), or they are "historical fiction" and describing another era (for example, contemporary Krajewski noirs, set in the 30s and prior)— they are not of this millennium.

The very best translators are, of course, absolutely invisible. I don't notice them, and they generally go unheralded.

How about you: do you pay any heed to who translates the foreign fiction you read? (Really, barring novels by the Tolstoys of the world, how often do you get to choose whose translation you're going to read?) Are you concerned about what's lost in translation?

To nurture the illusion

Basically, as far as Madame Thouret was concerned it was a disgraceful thing to get oneself murdered in an alleyway off the Boulevard Saint-Martin. She had planned her life in every detail, and not only her own life but also that of her family, and murder had no place in her scheme of things, especially this murder, with the corpse wearing brown shoes and a tie that might almost be described as red!

Maigret and the Man on the Boulevard, by Simenon, was my very first Maigret, and I was surprised and pleased to find that there were many similarities thematically to Simenon's romans durs that I've come to know and admire.

It is definitely a more traditional mystery novel — crime committed, police investigate, criminal apprehended.

It happpens that this murder victim had been living a double life. Although he'd lost his job almost three years previously, every morning he dressed and caught the train as if to go to work, and his wife was never the wiser. The wife was very much about keeping up with Joneses, and the man, despite his gripes and what may or may not have been unhappiness, somewhat ironically went to great lengths to keep up appearances.

My feeling is that while in the romans durs the reader faces existential angst from the inside, here Maigret observes it in others from a more tolerable distance. It's altogether softer.

In the old days he had been particularly struck, even one might say romantically stirred, by the sight of those who, discouraged and defeated, had given up the struggle, being swept along will nilly by the great, surging tide of humanity.

Since then, he had come to know many such people, and it was no longer them whom he most admired, but rather those just one step above them on the ladder, who were clean and decent and not in the least picturesque, and who fought day in and day out to keep their heads above water, or to nurture the illusion, or perhaps the faith, that they were alive and life was worth living.

This passage in particular has had the effect of making Simenon somewhat less dark in my eyes, less obsessive, more human, and easier to stomach, as a writer and as a person.

I don't see myself working through the entire Maigret catalogue (well, you never know...), but I do see how the occasional title might serve as a welcome antidote to Simenon's grittier work.

Simenon and the man who didn't stay to lunch

Circumstances conspired against it. The damp cold on its own might've kept me home with a book and a blanket, but Earth Day manifestations meant roads were blocked and kept other people away from the downtown core and the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival.

Despite a handful of people having expressed interest in Lunch and Literature: A Georges Simenon Salon, only one gentleman actually showed up. He was there with a genuine enthusiasm for Simenon, but he's also on the festival board of directors, and he absolved me of the responsibility of lunching with him. I admit I was a little disappointed, as he claimed to have read all 400 Simenon books, and I'm sure he could've told me a thing or two.

Evidently Joyce Carol Oates, who wrote an introduction to Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, did not feel obligated to attend.

It does make wonder who are all these people reading Simenon and responsible for the renaissance Simenon is reportedly enjoying. Is it you? (Drop me a line. I'm seriously interested in the demographics of the Simenon appeal.)

I have not yet finished all the homework I'd assigned myself. I'm still reading a biography of Simenon. There are a lot of facts in it. And I know for a fact that Simenon was a very interesting man. But ohmygawd-it-is-sssoooo-boring-shoot-me-now. I will skim through what's left of it in hopes of finding some meaningful insight, but I doubt I will find anything worth sharing with you. Simply, I would so much rather be reading a Simenon than reading about Simenon.

I have posted a version of my discussion notes, along with some supplemental material, to their own page. (These notes are subject to further editing for clarity and flow.)

These notes are deliberately very general in nature — even had the event attracted a full room, given Simenon's output there's no guarantee there'd be any overlap in the books everyone had read. The idea was to talk about Simenon in a general way and examine the attraction to his works via some common themes, with a focus on the romans durs (as opposed to the Maigret mysteries). You may find these notes useful in your own discussions on Simenon.

I will consider fleshing out this page with other Simenon resource material. For example, I'd like to add short (50-word) synopses of Simenon titles, something I'd started doing for my own easy reference.

Anyway. I'll keep reading Simenon, and maybe we can try to meet up for lunch again next year.

A sense of futility

Four blacks slid the coffin into the too-shallow hole. They used hoes to rake the dirt over it.

The idea that one day he might also be interred like this made Timar unbearably conscious of his life since La Rochele. This wasn't a cemetery! This wasn't a burial! He wasn't at home!

My God! How did I get here! And hours later:

At that point it wasn't just the misery of homesickness that had him in its grip: it was a sense of futility. The futility of being here! The futility of struggling against the sun that penetrated his every pore. The futility of the quinine that lifted his spirits and that he swallowed every night. The futility of living and dying, only to be buried in a fake cemetery by four half-naked blacks.

Set in and around Libreville (Gabon), the events of Simenon's Tropic Moon are presumably fairly contemporary with its 1933 publication.

I had a harder time getting into this book than I have had with any other Simenon novel. It thought it might be because it's a relatively early novel, but I checked the dates of the ones I've read, and no, that's not it.

I think it's because it's heavy on the foreignness of Africa, and I need a certain frame of mind for that sort of thing.

The story: Joseph Timar arrives in Libreville — his uncle had arranged a job for him. Within 48 hours of arriving, he's had an encounter with the hotel proprietor's wife, a black servant is murdered, and the proprietor himself dies of snail fever. There are racial tensions, the local government operates pretty loosely, and Timar finds that Adèle's been pretty, um, friendly with a lot of the white men about town.

Anyway, it's really short (133 pages), and there's a huge payoff — the final scenes are unforgettable.

The man who wasn't Maigret

Come discuss Simenon over lunch.

Sunday, April 22, 2012, at noon
Koko Restuarant, OPUS Hotel
10 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal

Email Irène Raparison to reserve a spot.

Living like a mushroom

After that he had spent three months in a hospital, although without suffering from any particular ailment; simply because he could not adapt himself to the state of being no longer a child.

Then, without any period of transition, he had become used to being nothing at all! Used to living like that, without the need to be greeted by other men and not caring for their opinion. Used to living like a mushroom or a tree, eating and drinking, doing anything for anyone.

— from The White Horse Inn, by George Simenon.

Written in 1938, and translated anew into English in 1980, The White Horse Inn is described on its book jacket flap as "one of Simenon's most admired novels" and featuring one of "his most powerful characters." (It struck me when I was browsing the library shelves that most of the Simenon novels there were described in a similarly superlative way, even though most of the titles don't ring any sort of bell.)

Distinguishing it from many of the other Simenon works I've read, the heart of this novel is a place, not a person or event.

So far, Simenon has a pretty consistent output — I can't say his earlier novels are any less mature or less psychologically complex than the later ones.

This was a library loan, and I almost didn't read it because of the gross tacky feel of the wrapper. Yuk.

Simenon in Montreal

If you're in Montreal next weekend, join me in discussing the work of Simenon over lunch, part of the 2012 Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival. You don't even have to know that much about Simenon. He's dead, so he won't be there to say you're wrong.

Whether Maigret is your all-time favourite detective, or you've fallen hard (as I have) for Simenon's romans durs, if you've only ever seen Monsieur Hire, or if you think Simenon was a misogynist pig, or even if you've never read a word by Simenon and just want to see what the fuss is about...

Lunch is at noon on Sunday, April 22, 2012, in the Koko Restuarant of the OPUS Hotel on Sherbrooke. The event is free, but you're expected to buy a lunch. Email Irène Raparison to reserve a spot.

What exists, exists

There just came a moment when I began to look around me with different eyes and I saw a city that looked strange to me, a pretty city, very neat, very luminous, very clean, a city in which everybody greeted me affably.

Why did I have that sensation of emptiness then?

I began looking at my house too and I asked myself why it was my house, what connexion there was between these rooms, this garden, this wrought-iron gate adorned with a brass plate bearing my name, and me.

I looked at Armande and I had to keep telling myself that she was my wife.

Why?

And the little girls who called me Papa . . .

[...]

What was I doing in a peaceful little town, in a charming comfortable house among people who smiled at me and cordially shook my hand?

[...]

And I was the only one to see the world in this way, the only one to be troubled in a universe that had no idea of what was happening to me.

In fact, for years and years I lived without being conscious of all this. I had scrupulously done the best I could, everthing I had been told to do. Without trying to know the reason. Without trying to understand.

A man must have a profession, and Mama had made a doctor of me. He must have children, and I had children. He must have a house, a wife, and I had all these. He must have distractions, and I drove a car, played bridge and tennis. He must have vacations, and I took my family to the seashore.

[...]

We have been so conditioned to think that what exists, exists; that the world is really as we see it, that we must do this or that and never act otherwise . . .

I shrugged my shoulders.

— from Act of Passion, by Simenon.

Just like David Byrne shrugs his shoulders through Once in a Lifetime. Yes, Georges, there is water at the bottom of the ocean.

So here's an obvious similarity between what might be my favourite pop song ever and Simenon's romans durs, with which I'm mildly obsessed: How did I get here?

I was afraid I was losing my Simenon mojo, right when I need it most. I set aside Tropic Moon, which was starting to feel like homework, and was richly rewarded with Act of Passion.

Act of Passion is told in the first person, taking the form of a letter from Charles Alavoine, a successful doctor, written from his prison cell, to the judge who presided over his trial for murder. It is not a confession or an apology; merely he wants to be understood.

The mystery is first how he should come to abandon his comfortable life, and then how when living his second comparatively idyllic life — poorer but in love, and feeling finally alive — he should be driven to murder the object of his affection.

That's all and it's not all, your Honour. It is all because nothing happened that was not perfectly commonplace. It is not all, because for the first time I was hungry for a life other than my own.

The song Once in Lifetime calms my general life-panic, gives me the feeling that everything's going to be OK (just once in a lifetime ask yourself these questions? just once in lifetime step outside of yourself? just once in a lifetime take a once-in-a-lifetime chance?). But when a Simenon character asks these questions, steps outside of himself, takes a bite out of life, things spiral out of control and go horribly, horribly wrong.

You are afraid, to be precise, of what has happened to me. You are afraid of yourself, of a certain frenzy which might take possession of you, afraid of the disgust that you feel growing in you with the slow and inexorable growth of a disease.

Mad Men gets literary again

Season 5 of Mad Men is off to a fine start. Episode 1 culminates in a surprise birthday party for Don. And it's a fabulous party: drinks for everyone, boys looking at girls, marijuana on the balcony, a little yé-yé, and a heated political discussion in the kitchen that references in great detail Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo.

[I read Johnny when I was about 14 and it blew my mind. And boy, do I know it — talking about that book is a great way to kill a party. But then, at 14, I was going to a different kind of party.]

No blatant literary references in episode 2, but I couldn't help but pick up a little Lolita vibe as Lane Pryce obsessed over a photo of aptly named Dolores.

Maybe it's a sign that Simenon is too much on my mind, but it strikes that a couple characters are potentially deeply Simenonesque.

Pete Campbell, junior partner. I don't find him sympathetic, or even likeable, but mostly he's just trying to catch a break. He tries hard. In these episodes I'm noticing a look in his eyes. When he rides in to work on the train in the morning, there's a look like it might be his last ride, he's not riding home ever again. When he returns to his suburban home one evening there's a look of "how did I get here?" (I mean, "how the hell did I end up here?") and for a moment I thought he might snap his wife's neck.

Lane Pryce, finance guy. British, but also deeply sympathetic. He keeps wanting to step out of his box, but always ends up squarely in his box. Now he finds a wallet, finds a photo inside the wallet, calls about returning the wallet and talks to the girl in the photo, returns the wallet, but keeps the photo. It's so small, but it's a transgression, and it's pervy. The others may topple secretaries over their desks, but Lane's innocuous actions are more loaded. My money's on Lane absconding with the company funds. For a girl.

Now, all the characters cross lines, social and ethical. So why do I point to these two as typical Simenon antiheroes? For most of the characters, their morals fall whichever way the 60s are blowing. They fill an immediate need, resolve an immediate problem; they scratch an itch. They're not, on the whole, acting out of any deep-seated unhappiness; they're just reacting. But these two! It's like they're prodding some existential bruise.

Is Simenon colouring the way I look at the world? Am I reading too much into Pete and Lane? Are they any different from the rest of the Mad Men? What do you think makes them tick?

See my list of books referred to in Mad Men's first 4 seasons.

The rain of your city

Every time I went to Caen it rained. And I liked the rain of your city. I like it for being fine, gentle and silent; I like it for the halo it throws around the landscape, for the mystery with which, in the twilight, it surrounds everybody you meet, especially the women.

— from Act of Passion, by Simenon.

I like the rain of my city too.