The crimes of psychiatry are legion, but they can mostly be attributed to a single cause: the idea that the therapist knows more than the patient.— A. Collins Braithwaite, Untherapy I have been fascinated by psychiatric case studies since I came across a copy of Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour thirty-odd years ago. ‘I am … Continue reading The Strange Cases of Maeder and Braithwaite
Author: Graeme Macrae Burnet
Aunt Jeanne
Aunt Jeanne belongs to the subset of Simenon’s dysfunctional family novels, among which can be counted The Others, The Fate of the Malous, Strange Inheritance and Uncle Charles, to name but a few. The novel opens with the return, after an absence of 36 years, of overweight, alcoholic, world-weary Jeanne to her childhood home. The … Continue reading Aunt Jeanne
The Mahé Circle
In The Mahé Circle, Simenon presents us with François Mahé, an overweight, thirty-five-year-old doctor, who lives with his wife, two children, and his mother, who still wakes him in the morning and tells him ‘when to change his underwear.’ The novel is mainly set on Porquerolles, a small island in the Mediterranean, where the Mahés … Continue reading The Mahé Circle
The Man with the Little Dog
When you read two or three Simenon novels in quick succession, the author’s oft-quoted statement that his “big novel is the mosaic of all [his] small novels” takes on greater resonance. Viewed together his romans durs map out of universe of drab, unremarkable lives; of little people going about their business, tortured by petty resentments, … Continue reading The Man with the Little Dog
The Cat
The premise of The Cat might have come from a Samuel Beckett play. A septuagenarian couple, Emile and Marguerite Bouin pass their days in their Paris apartment waiting for each other to die. They have not spoken to each other for years, instead exchanging unpleasant little notes written on scraps of paper. Emile accuses his … Continue reading The Cat
The Bottom of the Bottle
The best part of The Bottom of the Bottle is the opening chapter in which we meet PM Ashbridge, a wealthy New Mexico rancher. He is drinking in a bar and the subtle complicity between drinker and bartender is well described: Everything seems accidental, your gestures are the most casual in the world . . … Continue reading The Bottom of the Bottle
Strange Inheritance
A penniless orphan arrives in a small fishing port and finds he is the sole heir to the town’s business empire. A rich young man marries a factory girl, then falls in love with his uncle’s widow. A double-locked safe contains the secrets of a town’s well-heeled families. A woman is arrested on suspicion of … Continue reading Strange Inheritance
The Magician
The original title of The Magician was Antoine et Julie. It’s a significant change, shifting the focus from the relationship to the individual, now identified not by name but by profession. But this is very much a novel about a relationship, or rather about two relationships: firstly, that of 55-year-old Antoine to his wife, and, … Continue reading The Magician
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La Femme de Gilles / Madeleine Bourdouxhe
Madeleine Bourdouxhe’s novel opens with her protagonist, Elisa, awaiting her husband’s return from work. As she lays the table for the evening meal, she is transfixed, ‘giddy with tenderness’: ‘Overcome with the thought of his return her body, drowning in sweetness, melting with languor, loses all its strength.’ As the title suggests, Elisa is a … Continue reading La Femme de Gilles / Madeleine Bourdouxhe
The Brothers Rico
The remarkable thing about Simenon’s output is less the huge number of novels and the speed at which they were written, than the consistently high quality of his prose and his seemingly inexhaustible well of characters and observations. Nevertheless, among 185 novels there is bound to be the odd dud and The Brothers Rico is … Continue reading The Brothers Rico
Graeme Macrae Burnet 