This book is one of Simenon's psychological thrillers unrelated to his world famous Maigret detective stories. It is an amazing book both in its writing and in its story. Frank is an eighteen year old son of a prostitute coming of age in an unknown country in occupied Europe. He is morally bankrupt - murdering people without forethought or regret, inflicting emotional pain on women when they are desperately in love with him and emotionally torturing anyone who comes in contact with his life.
WARNING SPOILERS BELOW
The first half of the book relates Frank's exploits: the night he kills an army officer just for his pistol, the multiple times he screws the prostitutes in his mother's whore house and leaves them longing for some emotional output from him, the night he arranges for Sissy, his young virgin girlfriend, to be raped by Kromer and the night he kills the woman who brought him up as a child when his mother was absent just to steal a watch collection that she had.
All of this eventually catches up with him and one of the sections of the occupation authorities arrests him, and the second half of the book relates the story of his slow psychological breakdown and decay as he is held and tortured in a school converted to a prison.
This is a thoroughly 'entertaining' and well written book. I highly recommend that you read it.
1 comment:
I am loving your newfound foray into genre fiction. G. Simenon was an amazing writer mainly in terms of productivity - they say there are 550 million copies of his books in print!
Keep it up - you are going to catch up to me.
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