Reza, Simenon

Since my last post, I've read by Simenon: Le charretier de la providence, L’affaire Saint-Fiacre, les fiançailles de Mr. Hire, Le coup de lune, La maison du canal, L’homme qui regardait passer les trains, Le bourgmestre de Furnes, Les inconnus dans la maison, La veuve Couderc, Lettre à mon juge, La neige était sale, Les mémoires de Maigret, La mort de Belle, Maigret et l’homme du banc, L’horloger d’Everton, Le président, Le train, Maigret et les braves gens, Les anneaux de Bicêtre, Le petit saint, and Le chat.

About Simenon,I only really noticed Memoires de Maigret, which has an established character, hero of over fifty novels, talk directly to the reader for the first time. It was an interesting conceit.

By Yasmina Reza, I've read Hammerklavier, Nulle part, Adam Haberberg, Dans la luge d'Arthur Schopenhauer, Une désolation, and L'aube le soir ou la nuit. This last essay is about her following the now-President of France for a year during his campaign. She never actually says who he is, except in the acknowledgments at the back of the book. Her adventure certainly was well-known in France, but not here, and not, I presume, for posterity. Two of the books are reminiscences or reflections on her own life. The three novels include one written entirely in letters (Schopenhauer), naturally better done by Laclos, and another who talks about a writer losing his sight, an interesting premise that is never followed up.

I also read an issue each of The New Yorker, The Economist, and The New Scientist.

Simenon, MacEwan, Tillyard

I read the great novel of Belgian Liege, Pedigree, by Georges Simenon. It seems this was his bid for literary greatness, for acceptance in serious literary circles. It did not work for him, but the novel is interesting as a bildungsroman. I like his straightforward murder mysteries better. I read Stella Tillyard's book on the Lennox sisters, and I found it mildly diverting, and not particularly significant in historical terms. I thought the same of the television series. Insipid, I guess, compared to some of the heavy stuff I've read for history. Finally I read the much lauded Atonement, and I found it sexist almost to caricature. A thirteen year-old girl would bear false testimony out of sexual jealousy? How trite, and how out of date. I didn't get the class stuff at all, it certainly wasn't redeeming, and I didn't find the style sparkling either. It's unfortunate I had just read D. H. Lawrence, it's certainly not a fair comparison. I certainly am swimming against the trend on this one. How much ground the stereotypes about women have gained, and after all that work, too, from the wom n's movement.

Littell, Assouline, Simenon, Amette

I read since my last post an issue each of The Economist, The New Yorker, OK Magazine, and The New Scientist.

I also read Assouline's biography of Georges Simenon, followed by the first of 21 novels by Simenon. The biography was a quick, easy read, and it was not particularly insightful. I learned principally that Simenon suffered administrative detention after World War II for having published serialized novels in collaborationist newspapers. He was released fairly shortly. He also wrote anti-Semitic articles while a reporter in Belgium, and then featured anti-Semitic characters in his novels, even after the war. That gave me pause.

I also read Amette's Maitresse de Brecht, a post-war novel about East Germany and Brecht political wanderings. It was a quick, easy read, but I read it interspersed with a most affecting novel by Littell, Les Bienveillantes, and it struck me as lightweight compared to that.

So now I come to Littell. I feel strongly that any novel that is 892 pages long, even skipping (much to my dislike) the paragraph returns for the dialogue to save space, has to be pretentious in this day and age. I thought this book was about banal evil bureaucracies, as we follow the lawyer narrator through his memories of World War II, where he was a Nazi bean-counter. He engages in homosexual encounters without much affect being present, as far as I can tell, orders guards not to destroy a nest of ants in Auschwitz because a young prisoner is watching them, discusses politics and the menu of the train he travels on, receives without comment the suggestion from a superior that maybe he should get married, as people are starting to wonder. So I'm wondering why I should even read a novel that shows the everyday life of the people who came up with and put into action the Final Solution -- is the trivialization offensive? Why should I care what the minor functionaries felt after Stalingrad, waiting for Hitler to speak to them? Of course, I believe in the right of artists to broach any topic, raise any question. And then, doesn't the homosexuality make him something of an outsider, as gays were gassed too? So I'm going back and forth in my own mind.

And then, past page 700 somewhere, the narrator describes having sex with his younger sister, in quite explicit detail, and here I am thinking that this is the epitome of evil, as is the perpetration of the Holocaust, the one morally unambiguous evil of the 20th century -- until we know even more about the Stalinist purges and the state-induced famine under Mao. As the sexual acts come in quick succession, the sister is described putting her mouth on her brother's circumscribed penis. In Europe, of course, circumcision can only mean one thing. So here is the final reversal, the final play into moral ambiguity, where our Nazi lawyer bean-counter of the Holocaust is Jewish. So I know must suppose that the novel is about moral ambiguity, in the manner of Paul Verhoeven and his misunderstood satire, Starship Troopers, and his great film about the Dutch resistance, The Black Book. The novel is now being translated into English. I can imagine it will attract attention.