“In the Dordogne, but particularly in La Berthonie, the horizon is never far away and yet everything is always miles from everything else, which is how the region preserves its charm and which is also how it can become a prison in winter if you don’t have any cows to milk, any pigs to fatten or any chickens to slaughter. So the English who live in the Dordogne meet up in their informal clubs to do all sorts of things, but, more often than not, nothing in particular, while–as soon as six o’clock has struck–they quaff great quantities of all sorts of things alcoholic.”

Death in the Dordogne is the first in a series of mystery novels written by Louis Sanders concerning British ex-pats living in France. When I heard about these books, published by Serpent’s Tail, I knew that chances were I’d really enjoy them. I just finished Death in the Dordogne and I’m hooked.

The novel begins with a funeral of a French villager attended by the narrator, a British ex-pat, a Londoner who cashed in on the real estate bubble, and who now lives in the Dordogne and is considered the “newly installed Englishman.” He tries to “wriggle out” of the funeral, but he’s pressed into attending. Like many British ex-pats, he’s drawn to the fantasies and ideas of life in the French countryside and is shocked and disgruntled by the realities. The realities include freezing temperatures in an ancient house bought when his judgement was colored by romanticism, and images of a farmer’s wife who rather disgustingly stuffs ducks with food in order to make and sell foie gras. The narrator is just one of eight residents in the village of La Berthonie–a village that at one time boasted a population of 200, but this number has slowly dwindled down to the die-hard residents.

Perhaps the narrator just has too much time on his hands, but he begins to be bothered about the details of the death of Gaston, the strapping young man who met his supposedly accidental death while chopping wood in the forest. The funeral is a reminder in many ways that life (and death) in the bucolic village is real and not picture postcard perfect, but still overall the narrator “preferred to think back to the history books about the French peasantry in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.” These books were largely responsible for his mistaken notions about life in the French countryside.

When the narrator discovers that Gaston’s brother died under peculiar circumstances years earlier, this just provides fodder to the notion that there’s something odd about Gaston’s death. He speculates that Gaston was “killed to alleviate the boredom–if only momentarily–the boredom that hangs over these Dordogne evenings.” While he doesn’t exactly begin investigating, he does begin connecting with some of his more anti-social French neighbors, and this proves to be a big mistake.

Author Louis Sanders captures the ex-pat ambience to perfection. The other British outcasts patch together various social evenings–the dubious highlights of life for the British in the Dordogne, but for the most part, the narrator’s days are spent wondering if it’s too early to break open the alcohol. The narrator confesses to the reader that he “contemplate[s] with horror the few metres that lie between the fire and my favourite drink, a distance I will have to travel in the nightmarish cold in order to pour myself another drink. There isn’t any central heating; when I bought the house I still tended to confuse the downright uncomfortable with the picturesque.”

Largely oblivious to the fact he’s homesick for London, it finally begins to dawn on him that he is ultimately a stranger and an outcast, and that’s not likely to change. There’s one very funny moment when he realizes that the locals peg the other British ex-pats as a bit loony, and this is illustrated by the labels they are given. Then he realizes that he probably has a label too, and he admits to himself: “I was doing what I’d always wanted to do, which was, in a word: nothing.” But at the same time he wonders: “what am earth am I doing here?”

Death in the Dordogne is marvelously entertaining and slyly funny. The novel’s protagonist has just the right touch of pathetic sleaziness–from his endless evenings murky with alcohol to his cheesy attempts to ramp up his British eccentricities in a desperate attempt to impress and bed a French girl. In some ways the novel has the feel of a British cosy mystery–nothing too threatening, nothing too violent and the story is after all set in a village. But in this case the village is French, and murder is the trigger that leads the narrator to realize that he’s a ’stranger in a strange land.’

“And England is what it is because there are still some left among us who are born to high rank and who know how to live up to the standard that is required of us.”

One of Anthony Trollope’s Irish novels, An Eye For An Eye is a fairly short book that examines snobbery, inheritance and prejudice through an ill-fated love affair.

The Scroopes of Scroope Hall are an old, distinguished and wealthy family, but the Scroopes faces a dilemma in the subject of inheritance. Elderly Lord Scroope, a morose, melancholy and inflexible widower had two children–a boy and a girl. The hopes of the family rested on Scroope’s son and heir who proved to be a complete wastrel, running up debts, and “thoughtless” and “lavish,” the son eventually married a French prostitute. Completely ostracized from the family, the heir to the Scroope estate died. The daughter, Lady Blanche Neville married well but died childless.

The question then becomes who will inherit the Scroope estate, fortune and good name. Lord Scroope, who is estranged from his younger brother, has two nephews he has never cultivated, Fred and Jack Neville. Lord Scroope and his second wife invite Fred to gloomy Scroope Hall with the intention of making this nephew the sole heir of the Scroope fortune.

While Lord and Lady Scroope intend for Fred to immediately assume the lifestyle of the heir and make a suitable match, Fred has other plans. An officer in the army, he pleads for a year with his regiment soon to be stationed in Ireland. Citing obligations, the truth is that Fred wants adventure, and burying himself in the heavy gloom of Scroope Manor doesn’t appeal to his youthful imagination. So Fred leaves to join his regiment in Ireland–much to the silent disapproval of Lord and Lady Scroope.

Fred soon becomes entangled with a young beautiful Irish-catholic girl, Kate O’Hara. Kate lives with her impoverished mother alone in a little house perched on a cliff, and Fred, a frequent visitor, falls in love with Kate, and promises Mrs O’Hara that he will make Kate his wife. But Fred is forced to choose between Kate and the approval of his Scroope relatives.

While Fred is attracted to Kate for her lack of pretensions, her simplicity and natural grace, he very soon experiences a change of heart. This change of heart begins to erode Fred’s feelings for Kate in direct proportion to his acceptance of his familial responsibilities as the new Earl of Scroope. When Fred first arrives in Ireland, his fixation on wantonly slaughtering seals and seagulls is indicative of his thoughtless, randomly destructive nature. A day of hunting on the cliffs of Ireland is the sport of the wealthy, and Fred wastes his days in the empty pursuit of carcasses. He falls in love with the untamed Irish coast at the same he falls in love with Kate, but it’s a love that’s based on its contrasts with the stuffy confines of Scroope Hall and its looming responsibilities.

Fred is portrayed as a somewhat weak character who is caught between the cast-iron personalities of Lord Scroope and Mrs. O’Hara–both very strong-willed individuals who won’t give an inch. Fred, who’s both amiable and weak, tragically tries to please all sides in the dilemma–even fancifully imagining he can keep his promise to both Mrs. O’Hara and the Earl of Scroope. And, of course in the end, Fred ends up pleasing no one.

An Eye For An Eye is not Trollope’s best novel. It is not one of Trollope’s humorous tales, and I do tend to think that Trollope is at his best when he lays bare the vanities and foibles of human nature. An Eye For An Eye zeros in on snobbery, and anti-Irish sentiment is central here, but this is a simple tragic tale that weighs questions of morality against social conventions, prejudice and snobbery.

“There is nothing of you that you have not given to me.”

The twenty volumes in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series are set in France during the period 1851-1873, and the novels trace the fortunes of various members of the two branches of the same family. The Rougons are the legitimate, and so-called respectable branch whereas the Macquarts are fairly disreputable. Zola traces the hereditary influences of violence, alcoholism and prostitution through his characters as they nagivate the changing social landscape of life in the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1851-1873) in the years from the coup d’etat (1851) which overthrew the Republic to the aftermath of the Franco Prussian war of 1871.

The fifth novel in the series is the anti-clerical Abbe Mouret’s Transgression, and Serge Mouret is the Abbe in the title. Serge appears in the fourth novel, The Conquest of Plassans, but that novel mainly concerns his parents, Francois and Marthe Mouret. Over the course of the novel, Marthe becomes a religious fanatic, and her religious fervor is a key element in the destruction of her family.

When Abbe Mouret’s Transgression begins, Serge Mouret–still a young man–is the Cure of a village with 300 inhabitants:

“All its inhabitants were related, all bore the same name, so that from their very cradle they were distinguished amongst themselves by nicknames. An Artaud, their ancestor, had come hither and settled like a pariah in this waste. His family had grown with all the wild vitality of the herbage that sucked life from the rocky borders It had at last become a tribe, a rural community, in which cousin-ships were lost in the mists of centuries. They intermarried with shameless promiscuity. Not an instance could be cited of any Artaud taking himself a wife from any neighbouring village; only some of the girls occasionally went elsewhere. The others were born and died fixed to that spot, leisurely increasing and multiplying on their dunghills with the irreflectiveness of trees, and with no definite notion of the world that lay beyond the tawny rocks, in whose midst they vegetated. And yet there were already rich and poor among them; fowls having at times disappeared, the fowl houses were now closed at night with stout padlocks; moreover one Artaud had killed another Artaud one evening behind the mill. These folk, begirt by that belt of desolate hills, were truly a people apart -a race sprung from the soil, a miniature replica of mankind, three hundred souls all told, beginning the centuries once again.”

Abbe Mouret lives with his teenage sister Desiree and a loyal housekeeper named La Teuse. While Desiree, who has the mental capacity of a small child surrounds herself with animals, Abbe Mouret, who has clearly inherited the religious fanaticism of his mother, spends hours seeking some sort of religious ecstasy.  Prone to hysterical reveries induced by hours of religious contemplation, he cherishes an almost romantic love for religion, and he longs to leave his physical body and its functions behind.

After experiencing a collapse brought on by his religious fanaticism, Abbe Mouret’s uncle, Doctor Pascal takes his nephew to a gorgeous, secluded estate known as The Paradou. Built in the time of Louis XV, it was intended to represent a miniature Versailles. But partially damaged by fire, it now stands neglected and in a state of decay, inhabited only by an elderly caretaker, Jeanbernat and his niece, Albine. When Abbe Mouret recovers from his illness, he forgets his vows and falls in love with Albine.

On one level, Abbe Mouret and Albine become a latter-day Adam and Eve in The Paradou–their garden of Eden. Unlike Adam and Eve, however, they are not tempted by the Devil, but they are separated by the hideous, crude misogynist Brother Archangais. Torn between physical love and religious obligation, Abbe Mouret must choose. Abbe Mouret’s Trangression does not compare favourably to the other books in the series. There are pages and pages of descriptions of Abbe Mouret’s delirious, religious imaginative reveries, and after a while enough is enough. Character is subsumed by symbolism, and this is basically a simple tale in which not much really happens.

Abbe Mouret’s ‘choice’ however, creates an intriguing situation. Prior to knowing and loving Albine, Mouret really had nothing to sacrifice, and by ending his relationship with Albine–the woman he loves–he creates a world of mental self-flagellation. Whereas before he fantasized about enduring various physical and mental hardships in order to prove his love for god, now he really has something to suffer for. So strangely enough, meeting and relinquishing Albine just pushes Mouret one step closer to the state of religious ecstasy he longs for.

Desiree represents innocence in the novel, and yet as the story continues it’s apparent that her innocence really masks a horrific indifference. At first, she seems childlike and unfettered by the religious cares that trouble her brother, but Desiree is devoid of any natural feelings. Her love is revealed as warped, hideous and destructive though her relationships with her animals. Similarly Brother Archangais’s love for his fellow man is non-existent. He hates all women, and can only interact with other people through a system permeated with hate and an unquenchable need for punishment.

 ”I’m not nice and I’m too old to start now.”

The Grandmother by Simenon focuses on the relationship between two women, an affluent young woman and her elderly grandmother. When the novel begins, Sophie Emel is living with her friend, Lelia in a large Parisian flat. A police superintendent with a rather sensitive problem contacts Sophie. It seems that fifteen years earlier, Sophie’s grandmother, Juliette, simply disappeared. At age sixty-five, she walked away, and there’s been no news of her since. But it seems that for this entire time, Juliette has actually been living nearby in a house that is about to be demolished. The old lady, now eighty, is the last tenant left, and although there are no utilities, she refuses to leave, threatening suicide if anyone tries to storm her tiny flat.

With no clear plan in mind Sophie agrees to try to persuade her tenacious grandmother to leave the depilated flat. To everyone’s surprise, Juliette agrees to leave, accepting Sophie’s offer to move into her flat. But almost immediately Sophie makes the offer, she begins to regret it.

A strange, creeping power struggle starts to take place within Sophie’s flat: “a complicated game full of subtleties and nuances.” The maid, Louise, who was at first hostile to Juliette’s presence shifts loyalties from Sophie to her grandmother, and even though Juliette occupies a tiny room in the flat, somehow Sophie feels stifled by the forced relationship. While Sophie has a horror of sharing her life with a man, she finds that she resents Juliette’s suffocating, constant presence.

Sophie leads a peculiar life. She’s a dilettante, a playgirl who largely avoids men and engages in thrill-seeking sports as a pastime. There are hints of lesbianism between Sophie and Lelia, and Juliette understands that her granddaughter tends to patronize a series of troubled young women, and ultimately flings them aside when their emotional baggage becomes too messy and complicated.

Sophie becomes obsessed with her grandmother, and she frequently attributes sinister motives to the grandmother’s simplest act. Are her suspicions correct? Is Juliette insane as the superintendent implies or is she just a lonely old lady? They are too much alike, and Juliette is capable of seeing and understanding the darkest corners of Sophie’s soul. Recognition of each other’s true characters make them both uncomfortable, and their domestic arrangement becomes increasingly impossible until it becomes obvious that something must change….

The Grandmother is perhaps one of the more puzzling Simenon novels I’ve read so far, and certainly not my favourite. But that said, I’m still mulling over some of the book’s implications. Georges Simenon is perhaps best known for his Maigret series, but The Grandmother is one of his psychological romans durs (hard novels).

“When he came out of prison, he had also gone to eat ice cream. They handed him some money, two hundred-odd francs–he did not know exactly why. He had taken a bus. He had slept in one town, then in another, he was committed to nothing, nothing he did possessed either weight or importance.”

George Simenon’s novel The Widow is the latest offering in NYRB’s Simenon revival, and for this fan, long may the reissues last. While this extremely prolific Belgium author who penned nearly 200 novels and over 150 novellas is perhaps best remembered for his Maigret detective books, the psychological complexities of Simenon’s disturbing romans durs (hard novels) should create a legion of devoted fans.

Many of Simenon’s romans durs focus on the lives of perfectly ordinary, conformist middle-aged males who one day abandon their bourgeois lifestyles for the darker side of life (Monsieur Monde Vanishes, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By). In the process, these characters discover that the lives they led were not a matter of choice–but a matter of conformity and conditioning. The protagonists sometimes embrace or at least experiment with danger after meeting an unorthodox male who introduces an escape route through a particular event (Red Lights, The Venice Train). The Widow  is an atypical romans durs as it presents a strong central female character–the middle-aged, stocky and domineering Tati Couderc who presides over a farm in the Bourbonnais region. Originally a servant girl, Tati married and outlived the farmer’s son, and then threw out his two sisters. While she controls the household, her father-in-law (referred to as “Old Trash”) still owns the farm. According to his displaced, resentful daughters, Tati takes advantage of their father’s creeping senility, but Tati is convinced he’s far more craftily cognizant of his situation than his daughters realize.

When The Widow  begins Tati is riding a country bus home from market when she spies a fellow passenger–a strapping young man named Jean–newly released from prison for murder. While the other passengers on the bus try to ignore this obvious outsider, the widow makes eye contact; something passes between Jean and Tati: “the two had recognized each other.” When Tati gets off at her stop, Jean follows. The widow precipitously employs Jean as a handyman, and he begins living in the house, performing various chores around the farm.

It’s just a matter of time before Tati and Jean begin a sexual liaison, but Tati makes it clear that she also has sex with her elderly father-in-law. Both men accept the fact that Tati periodically services them both–there’s no trace of jealousy, no hint of romance–just uncomplicated couplings based on proximity and need. Tati isn’t a sexy or attractive woman by any means–she’s dumpy, and while a ferocious housekeeper, her personal cleanliness leaves a great deal to be desired.

But while sexual relationships between Tati and the two men in her life are uncomplicated, volatile passions rage over questions of ownership and inheritance. At first the farm offers an idyllic refuge for Jean, but it soon becomes obvious that this seemingly peaceful setting is a nexus of simmering violence, greed and hatred. Jean, the outsider, fresh from prison and the scion of a very wealthy local family, becomes a catalyst for the explosive events that take place.

Paul Theroux’s excellent introduction analyzes the novel and also argues that Simenon is criminally overlooked by academia. And part of the explanation, argues Theroux, is that Simenon was so prolific that “his detractors put him down as a compulsive hack.” Still under appreciated today, many people have yet to discover Simenon’s bleak vision of despair, and that’s really incredible given the sheer number of Simenon novels transferred to the screen. If you’re curious, just visit the Internet Movie Data Base www.imdb.com  and search on Georges Simenon. Watch the list of credits appear; it’s impressive.

Theroux compares The Widow  favorably to Camus’ L’Etranger, and while I agree with his introduction, I would add that Simenon’s “implicitly existential novel” is also perfect noir fiction. Just consider the Sam Ross novel He Ran All the Way or Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice–novels that present protagonists trapped in a maze of despair and indifference from which there is no escape. In The Widow, Jean is an emotionally numbed drifter who arrives in a seemly idyllic spot only to see it morph into a personal hell. If character is fate, then conditions at the farm force Jean to confront his personal demons once again. His character led him to commit murder 5 years earlier, and the same pressures uncannily re-emerge–this time through an uneven and savage love triangle. Any reader of noir novels will appreciate Jean’s final acceptance of his inescapable fate: “He waited for what could not fail to happen.”

“For Rene Maugras, dates and times of day did not exist, and only later on was problem of elapsed time to trouble him. He was still sunk at the bottom of a pit as dark as the abyss of ocean, deprived of contact with the outside world. He did not realize that his right arm had begun to twitch spasmodically, or that each time he breathed out his cheek puffed up in a ridiculous way.”

Simenon’s novel The Bells of Bicetre is the story of Rene Maugras, a prominent Parisian newspaper publisher who suffers a stroke at age 54 and is subsequently hospitalized. Told in the third person, the novel begins with Maugras waking up in hospital after suffering a humiliating collapse in the bathroom of a swanky restaurant.

The Bells of Bicetre follows the progress of Maugras as he regains consciousness only to discover that he’s suffered a stroke that has left him paralyzed on one side of his body. Affluent and influential, Maugras has a private room in Bicetre Hospital and he’s tended by his friend, Dr. Pierre Besson d’Argoulet. The novel explores Maugras’ depression and his feelings of humiliation as his bodily needs are taken care of by total strangers. In spite of the fact he is paralyzed and unable to speak, Maugras develops a different relationship with each of his three nurses. While he’s sexually attracted to the earthy night nurse, Josefa, he becomes possessive of the elegant day nurse, Blanche. But it’s Angele, the coarse Sunday replacement who harasses him out of his stupor and drags him back into the world of the living.

As the days progress and Maugras improves, he feels mesmerized by the church bells that remind him of his childhood and his long-dead mother. Paralyzed and unable to communicate, Maugras finds his mind focusing on certain pivotal, central moments in his life–his love affairs, his friendships and his marriage. Trapped in a hospital bed, he analyzes his bizarre married life with the much younger, unstable, and self-focused Lina.

While I can’t say that The Bells of Bicetre is by any means my favorite Simenon novel, it’s certainly a change of pace. Simenon, an extremely prolific Belgium writer penned nearly 200 novels and over 150 novellas during the span of his long career. Best remembered for his series of Maigret detective novels, I prefer Simenon’s romans durs (hard novels) for their bleak, noir outlook. Nonetheless, The Bells of Bicetre told mainly from the mental meanderings of a stroke patient is testament to Simenon’s skill as a writer.

The Bells of Bicetre doesn’t seem to fit into the romans durs category, but it’s certainly a fascinating read. There’s little interaction between Maugras and his various caretakers and relatively little conversation. The novel is basically a record of Maugras’ painful recovery and his thoughts as he lays helpless in bed. Here he’s finally forced to examine the intimacies of a life he’s largely managed to avoid by concentrating on superficialities and his driving ambition:

“He felt no bitterness. And if he pursued his self-analysis he would discover that he felt no regrets. On the contrary! Deliberately he recalled his previous way of life, up till that last Tuesday morning, and he was surprised at having led such a life, at having attached any importance to it, at having played a game that now struck him as puerile.”

 “I know what happens to men once they’re on their own.”

In Simenon’s novel The Venice Train, middle-aged, portly Justin Calmar returns home to Paris from his annual holiday in Venice, leaving his wife and two children behind to spend a last few days on the beach. On the train, he shares a compartment with a mysterious man who questions him intensely about his life and routine. Calmar finds himself answering all the stranger’s questions, even though he has the feeling that he’s being cross-examined. He’s basically too weak-willed to object to the stranger’s continued scrutiny, and he also considers it a matter of pride to be “honest” when it comes to answering a series of probing questions.

The stranger asks Calmar for a favour, and before he grasps the peculiarities and dangers of the request, Calmar finds himself agreeing to deliver an attaché case to an address in Lausanne. Suddenly, Calmar, a mild-mannered man who’s led a life of boring, predictable respectability, is up to his neck in intrigue and murder. Finding himself in possession of a fortune, Calmar tries to return to his regular routine. But the fact that he has a fortune, and that other people–perhaps even people capable of murder–are searching for the money in his possession–makes Calmar a nervous wreck. He is a changed man.

While Calmar is plagued with nervous obsession about the money, he vaguely and dully grasps some aspects of his life that escaped him before. With the sudden need to keep secrets and avoid his wife’s observations, Calmar develops a hidden life that revolves around stashing his stolen money. Everyone in Calmar’s life realizes that he hasn’t been the same since returning from Venice, but people draw different conclusions about these changes.

While Belgium-born Simenon is best known for his Maigret novels, he also wrote many romans durs (hard novels). The Venice Train falls into this category. One popular theme in these psychological novels is to explore what happens to a man when some event, some quirk of fate reveals the seamy underbelly of life. In The Venice Train, for example, Calmar becomes a criminal without ever intending to be one. He simply takes one wrong step, makes one wrong decision, and from that point on, his life is never the same. Calmar “had a vague admiration for people who were tough, who didn’t need anyone else, who required no rules, who didn’t smile when they were spoken to, who remained themselves at all times, without caring what others thought of them.” And this admiration of a different sort of man is partially responsible for Calmar’s problems. Calmar is a man who’s never examined his life or the decisions he’s made. In some ways he’s simply drifted along the path of least resistance–even marrying a workmate’s discarded mistress at one point. A creature of obedience and conformity, Calmar is easily manipulated by the stranger on the train, and he finds himself agreeing to participate in some very suspicious activity rather than refuse and risk offending the stranger.

As usual, Simenon reveals some fascinating aspects of human nature in the novel. Calmar isn’t a ‘good’ man–he’s simply a conformist trained to obey societal rules. Presented with a questionable, possibly criminal situation, Calmar’s conditioning to conform even overrides common sense and self-preservation. Calmar’s conditioning, which substitutes for morality plunges him into an abyss from which there is only one way to escape….

This novel raises the spectre of choice and ‘freedom.’ Just how free are we to chose our paths in life? Or are we just conditioned to be drones? And what happens to one of these drones (Calmar in this case), when another person who’s outside of the bounds and confining restraints of society reveals another way of living? If you enjoy The Venice Train, then I also recommend Red Lights–another Simenon novel that deals with an unhappy married man who takes a walk on the wild side.

“Did he realize that he was making a fool of himself? He thought he’d put his ‘mark’ on the new girl, to use his phrase, but in fact it was she who had out her mark so oddly on him.”

Simenon’s novel Striptease concerns the lives of four strippers who work in the seedy Cannes nightclub, Monico. The nightclub isn’t exactly the sort of place we tend to conjure up when we think of the Riviera, and its patrons, for the most part, are the less well-heeled visitors to the resort. The Monico is owned and operated by the middle-aged husband-and-wife team Monsieur Leon and Madame Florence. Leon, an ex-convict and ex-pimp quickly establishes sexual dominance with any new stripper by claiming sex as a ‘right’–something that goes right along with employment. Madame Florence, a former prostitute, now turning to fat, chooses to runs a blind eye to these liaisons. To her these encounters between Leon and the strippers are brief, meaningless, and expected.

When the book begins, the Monico employs four striptease ‘artistes.’ They are a sad lot. One girl has problems keeping clean, another one is fat and unattractive. Natasha, a statuesque girl holds herself a little aloof from the dingy aspects of the Monico. Celita, now 32 years old, and Leon’s current interest is determined to oust Florence and take over the management of the nightclub. Enter Maud–a fresh young girl–just nineteen–who has ambitions, it seems, to become a striptease artist.

Maud’s arrival on the scene has terrible ramifications on the staff of the Monico, and exactly what occurs is the heart of this wonderfully dark novel from Simenon. Belgium-born Simenon, an extremely prolific writer who penned almost 200 novels and over 150 novellas is best known for his Maigret novels. But he also wrote many romans durs (hard novels). These psychologically complex novels are great favorites of mine, and once you start reading Simenon, you are likely to get hooked.

The world of Simenon’s romans durs novels is an ugly place, and this holds true for Striptease. The Monico’s four strippers are in a desperately vulnerable position, but they don’t seem to see that, and they certainly don’t acknowledge it. Night after night, wearing torn and faded costumes they perform their pathetic, amateurish routines. In between stripping for the customers, they serve as dance hostesses, racking up drink bills on the customers’ tabs. And then when the club closes, the strippers assume their final roles for the night and prostitute themselves to earn a few extra francs between paychecks. The strippers are just one step away from becoming streetwalkers, and it’s the seediness of the Monico that allows them to pretend they have careers and that prostitution is a minor aspect of their lives. In reality, they became prostitutes the moment they were employed by Leon, and he became their pimp, rapidly establishing his sexual dominance and ownership.

Celita is not a particularly sympathetic character, but then none of the characters in these pages are sympathetic or even likeable. These are people who just want to survive and improve their circumstances in the process if they can. In Celita’s case, she eyes Florence’s superior position behind the cash register, and decides to take her place. Florence is middle-aged, fat and unattractive, so Celita thinks it’s perfectly natural for Leon to give Florence the old heave-ho. Florence is quite aware that her husband’s usual fleeting sexual encounter with each girl has extended, in Celita’s case, to a full blown affair. For this reason, she hates Celita. But when Maud appears on the scene, the new girl becomes a threat to both women….

In this novel, Simenon establishes himself as a master of atmosphere as he creates the tawdry world within the nightclub, and as the light fades, The Monico comes to life. Its employees eagerly capture and draw in stray tourists, and once inside, the dimmed lights, candles and alcohol disguise the squalor and dinginess of this third-rate club. The novel includes some unforgettable characters–Emile whose job it is to hustle suckers inside the Monico, and the enigmatic customer who is interested in Celita because she has “all the vices.”

As with most of Simenon’s novels, Striptease is long out-of-print–although the NYRB has republished a few titles in recent months. Can we expect to see a Simenon revival? I certainly hope so.

“She was beginning to hate her money. It had brought her nothing but trial and tribulation.”

The Trollope Society website (www.trollopesociety.org ) lists Miss Mackenzie as one of Trollope’s comic novels. While I enjoyed the novel a great deal, I can’t say that I found it particularly ‘comic’ especially when compared with Trollope’s very amusing Barchester Towers. That said, Miss Mackenzie is a good find for Trollope fans if you want to read one of the lesser-known titles. Lacking Trollope’s merciless, but droll and ultimately generous view of human foibles, Miss Mackenzie is a gentle novel that follows the trials and romantic tribulations of a penniless spinster who suddenly inherits a large sum of money. Abruptly thrust from a sheltered, boring existence into the dangers of society, Miss Mackenzie discovers that her fortune attracts the suitors she lacked in her youth, and these suitors create a number of dilemmas for our soft-hearted heroine.

Rapidly approaching middle age, with no marital prospects and no money of her own, Miss Margaret Mackenzie has spent her adult life living on her brother Walter’s charity in his modest home. Walter, a clerk, was a “poor sickly creature,” and Margaret nursed him until he died. The Mackenzies are not a wealthy family, by any means, and while one side of the family is landed gentry, the other side is connected to trade. When Walter dies prematurely, Miss Mackenzie becomes the sole beneficiary of her brother’s fortune of twelve thousand pounds. Years earlier, a legacy of twenty-four thousand pounds from a wealthy relative was split between the two brothers, Walter and Tom Mackenzie. While Margaret received nothing in the will, Walter saved his inheritance and continued to work in his minor clerical post. Tom, however, made some extremely poor business decisions. When the book begins, Tom now encumbered with a large family, a grasping wife and a failing business is penniless.

As soon as Margaret Mackenzie becomes an heiress, she rapidly discovers that her inheritance comes with a price. Tom’s wife had hoped for half of the money, and so a certain amount of bitterness and disappointment is directed towards Margaret. Margaret will receive an income of 800 pounds a year from the inheritance, and while Tom and his wife expect Margaret to move in with them, instead she decides to move to a small town and establish a life of her own. But the attitude that Margaret somehow doesn’t ‘deserve’ the inheritance–that there are others more deserving with greater need–is established by some of the other characters early in the plot. This theme continues throughout the novel, and it’s certainly an interesting idea to contemplate. Some people do envy others their wealth, and how many times do we hear the expression–’what would I do with that kind of money’ as we spend it a million ways in our imagination. In Margaret’s case, the situation is complicated by the fact she feels that her money should be put to good use, but then a number of people in her life have their own theories of how the money would benefit them.

Margaret moves to the town of Littlebath in an attempt to be independent and experience some of the sort of society she missed in her youth. While this decision is not a disaster by any means, Margaret’s life becomes rather complicated as various suitors emerge to claim her hand and her fortune (not necessarily in that order). Since Margaret harbors a secret romantic nature, she’s vulnerable to being courted, and she contemplates marriage to men that she probably would not have considered had she lacked this romantic streak. Three suitors emerge to lay siege to the spinster: Mr. Rubb (and his inappropriate yellow gloves)–her brother’s shady, ingratiating business partner, cousin, widower, and future baronet John Ball, and the ambitious clergyman Jeremiah Maguire. If you are familiar with Trollope, then you have a good idea of the sort of clergymen Trollope creates within his novels, and Jeremiah Maguire, cursed with a squint, is determined to win Margaret and her money–no matter the cost–to everyone else.

The class system is a strong factor in the novel. Margaret is horrified that her brother Tom entered “Trade,” and the strict hierarchal distinction is made of “commerce” over “trade.” Trade is inferior to commerce and to be distinguished by the fact that tradespeople deal with the public. Margaret’s rapid rise and fall in fortune exposes her to some very unpleasant aspects of human nature as she naively navigates through greed and the vagaries of disgruntled, acrimonious relatives. This is a pleasing novel for Trollope fans with plenty of twists and turns to keep the reader guessing until the end.

“The implication was that Charles Dupeux was the sort of man who might do anything.”

In Uncle Charles Has Locked Himself In from author Simenon, mild-mannered accountant Charles Dupeux returns home one day, and much to the astonishment of his wife and daughters, instead of keeping to the routine of joining everyone for the evening meal, he wordlessly retreats to the attic and locks himself in. While Charles’s plump wife, Laurence can’t understand her husband’s actions, she chalks it up to some idiosyncrasy on his part. Their daughters Lulu, Camille and Mauricette are too involved with their own illicit love affairs to be concerned. But when Charles’s self-imposed isolation continues, Laurence begins to wonder if Charles’s behaviour may be rooted in something more than peevish whim.

Charles’s wealthy, unpleasant boss, brother-in-law and business owner Henri Dionnet enters the drama. A cold, harsh and cruel man, it seems somewhat out of character for Henri to become involved or concerned about anyone else’s discomfort. Henri, called to assist in the dilemma, reacts with a surprising amount of emotion. Just what secret exists between these two men is at the heart of this dark novel.

Belgium-born Simenon wrote almost 200 novels and over 15 novellas in his lifetime. Best known for his Maigret novels, Simenon also wrote a substantial number of romans durs (hard novels) known for their psychological complexity. Whereas in some of these novels, he explores the fallout of a man who simply leaves his life of routine and conformity behind (The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, Monsieur Monde Vanishes), in Uncle Charles Has Locked Himself In, the protagonist does not leave home and instead we discover the dark corners of his character through his domestic and employment experiences. Locked in the attic, in self-imposed isolation, Charles Dupeux gathers his thoughts and also learns his daughters’ secrets.

Dark and unrelenting in its outlook on domestic life, Uncle Charles Has Locked Himself In, presents a portrait of a raucous, extended family. Diverse, strong personalities clash at every family gathering. One wife is locked up for her drunken scenes, and various ne-er-do well relatives posture and preen in front of a captive, familial audience. But more than anything else, Uncle Charles Has Locked Himself In dissects the nature of power.

Those of us who love Simenon’s romans durs should enjoy this title. Uncle Charles Has Locked Himself In was a very quick read, but in spite of that, this perceptive novella reveals layers of human psychology. Charles Dupeux has spent a lifetime as a powerless individual. Unappreciated by his wife and family, treated with contempt by his employer Henri, Charles grasps, without hesitation an opportunity to turn the tables on his boss. Once he has power over Henri, Charles doesn’t have any particular direction for his revenge, but he proceeds to explore the boundaries of his new-found power, relishing every exquisite sensation of “pure joy” until one evening….