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
Georges Simenon
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 Blue Room
How could he guess that he was to live through this scene ten times, twenty times, more times indeed than he could count? The Blue Room opens with Tony Falcone and his mistress, Andrée – ‘light-headed, their bodies still tingling’ – on a post-coital high following their monthly tryst at the Hôtel des Voyageurs. Tony … Continue reading The Blue Room
One Way Out
In their most passionate moments . . . her body was taught and quivering like a stretched wire, her pupils rigid as a sleepwalkers. One Way Out tells the story of a doomed relationship between Bachelin, a hot-headed young clerk, and Juliette, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a comfortably bourgeois cashier in the provincial town of … Continue reading One Way Out
Belle
It sometimes happens that a man at home moves about the house, goes through familiar motions, everyday motions, his expression unguarded, and, suddenly raising his eyes, he notices that the curtains have not been drawn and that people are watching him from outside. The opening of Belle describes a state of being characteristic of a … Continue reading Belle
The Lodger
The snow had melted. Fields and forests were black as ink. The whole visible world was saturated with moisture, exuding a cold, dank vapour. The backdrop to The Lodger is a dismal, wintry Belgium. First Brussels, then the bleak mining town of Charleroi, where the protagonist, Elias Nagear, holes up in a dreary boarding house … Continue reading The Lodger
Graeme Macrae Burnet 