 |
| Le Livre de Poche France, 2008 |
Elle regarda Laure dan les yeux, méchamment, acheva d'une voix dure:
– Toute ma vie, j'ai couru après ma blessure.
Elle s'était juré de ne pas pleurer. Ce n'était plus possible. Les larmes jaillissaient, épaisses, de ses paupières chaudes, coulaient le long de son nez, mettaient un goût salé dans sa bouche. En même temps, elle riait.
She looked Laure in the eyes, spitefully, finished in a hard voice:
'All my life, I've chased after my wound.'
She didn't blame herself for not crying. It was no longer possible. The tears gushed out, thickly, from her hot eyelids, ran along her nose, put a dirty taste in her mouth. At the same time, she laughed.
Excerpts translated by
The Novel: An attractive young woman, drunk and disoriented and in desperate need of a bath, turns up one night in a seedy Paris bar called Le Trou [The Hole]. She has no idea how she came to be there, only that she is no longer welcome in the plush apartment on the Rue de Ponthieu she formerly shared with her husband and their two young daughters.
The
bar owner, Mario, takes pity on her and asks if she would like something to
eat. No, she tells him, nothing. But she would like another drink if
she could have one. She must keep drinking to block out the memories ––
of all the men she's had sex with that day, of the one who brought her
to this decidedly sleazy bar, of signing the paper which granted full
custody of her children to her husband and his family –– or she may go mad.
But
what would it matter if she did lose her mind? Who would really care if
she woke up in a hospital or the gutter the next day or, better yet,
never woke up at all? She's a drunk and a whore. The paper she signed
with her own name –– 'Elisabeth Etamble, née Fayet' –– and had witnessed by her husband and mother-in-law freely admitted as much.
So begins one of Simenon's most chilling novels, a disturbing yet psychologically riveting examination of the ideas that damnation holds a certain appeal in the minds of certain people and that no good deed, however noble it may be in intention, ever goes unpunished.
Betty,
as Elisabeth now calls herself, is eventually taken home and cared for
by Mario's girlfriend, a generous and motherly middle-aged widow named
Laure. Laure allows Betty to stay with her in her hotel room and, as
she and the equally concerned Mario slowly nurse her back to health,
they gradually begin to piece together the tragic details of her story.
Trapped in a loveless bourgeois marriage to Guy, a man who
neither needed nor ever truly understood her, Betty sought refuge in the
arms of a lover, becoming more and more reckless as time went on until,
one night, she was caught making love to him on the floor of their
apartment by Guy and his mother.
Disgusted and mortified at being cuckolded like this in front of his mother, Guy threw Betty out, later making her sign a paper admitting her guilt and giving him custody of their daughters in exchange for a specific sum of money. This, Betty tells Laure, was the crowning achievement of a life devoted to wickedness, of an existence spent digging into the 'wound' that has simultaneously defined and blighted it. She always suspected that she would turn out to be a whore, she says, after voyeuristically observing her uncle having sex with his own parlor maid when she was fifteen. Signing the paper that deprived her of her children and being thrown out by her husband had been nothing more than the next logical step on her inevitable, self-guided road to hell.
 |
| Hamish Hamilton UK, 1975 |
But Guy proves to be more forgiving than she suspected, offering her a chance to return home and continue their loveless marriage as long as she agrees to act as though nothing has happened. Betty considers accepting his proposal but ultimately rejects it, realizing that she cannot deny her true nature now that she has finally found the courage to admit the full truth of who and what she is to herself. She stays with Laure and Mario, continuing to eavesdrop on them making love and talking about her, cunningly plotting her next move while she does so. She begins flirting with Mario whenever Laure's back is turned, making plans to run off with him even though a doctor has warned her that she needs rest and care in a quiet, stable environment. But Betty seeks neither rest nor stability. She is une femme maudite [a damned woman] and must continue to pursue her own destruction and the destruction of everything 'respectable' even if the act of doing so robs Laure, her friend and benefactor, of the one thing that gives her own life as a wealthy but lonely widow its only sense of happiness and purpose.
_by_Erling_Mandelmann_.jpg) |
| GEORGES SIMENON, 1963 |
The Writer: Georges Simenon was born in the Belgian city of Liège on 13 February 1903 and died eighty-six years later in the Swiss city of Lausanne, having published close to two hundred novels, over a hundred and fifty novellas and scores of short stories, articles and humorous pieces in the meantime.
For most of his career he was the world's bestselling author, thanks largely to the series of successful romans policiers [crime
novels] he published between 1931 and 1972 which featured his most
famous creation, Commissaire Maigret (known as Inspector Maigret in most
English translations of his work). While the Maigret novels made
Simenon wealthy and famous ––
the character is to the francophone world what Sherlock Holmes is to
the anglophone world and has been the subject of dozens of film,
television and radio adaptations –– his most insightful and arguably best work is found in his romans durs ['hard' or 'tough' novels], beginning in 1931 with Le Relais d'Alsace and including such later masterpieces as Le Coup de lune [Tropic Moon], Lettre à mon juge [Letter to My Judge], La Veuve Couderc [The Widow] and La neige était sale [Dirty Snow]. These novels are gripping character studies of people living on the fringes of society –– drunks, outcasts, failures as well as the just plain foolish and persistently unlucky –– and drew strongly on his years as a newspaper reporter, raconteur and habituée
of Paris nightclubs for their plots and background detail. They are
less about crime than about what motivates crime and the havoc it wreaks
on the lives of hapless, self-deceiving human beings. As Simenon
himself wrote to fellow novelist André Gide in 1939: 'Ne pas pouvoir voir un homme sans se mettre à sa place, souffir pour lui…l'idéal
serait de pouvoir dire tous les hommes, d'avoir vécu toutes leurs
vies. Même en petit, souffert toutes leurs souffrances. J'en suis
loin! Avec le temps, je me rapprocherai cet idéal.' ['I can't see a man without putting myself in his place, suffering for him…the
ideal would be to have the power to speak for everybody, to live
everybody's lives. Even in a small way, to suffer everything they
suffer. I'm far from doing that! In time, I will come closer to
reaching this ideal.']
 |
| Film Poster, 1992 |
Simenon
was married twice and had children with each of his two wives. He also
had many affairs, which complicated his life but also furnished him
with much of the raw material he needed for his work. In 1978 his
daughter Marie-Jo, his second child by his second wife Denyse, committed
suicide ––
a tragedy which saw him retreat from the spotlight to a certain extent,
even though he continued to publish novels and went on to dictate and
publish several volumes of memoirs prior to his own death on 4 September 1989. An
inveterate traveler throughout his life, Simenon visited Africa, the
Middle East and the USSR and also spent ten years living in the United
States –– a stay which inspired much of his finest work –– before he returned to
live permanently in Europe in 1955. An amazingly prolific author, he
frequently managed to churn out between 60 and 80 pages of publishable
prose a day ––
a feat any writer would envy and a gift that was no doubt the source of
his incredible artistic as well as financial success. He was, as André Gide rightly called him, a 'phenomenon' who also happened to be one of the most psychologically astute novelists of the twentieth century.
Last updated 23 May 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment