Finishing this book was a little bitter sweet for me because it means that I only have one more of Simenon's roman durs to read and then I will be done with all of them. They have all been awesome books and this one does not disappoint.
This is a very dark story of a prominent French stage actor whose wife left him for a 21 year old hunk. Finding it unbearable to live in Paris, he decides to move to America. He first tries to look for work in Hollywood but can't find anything at all that would be in keeping with his stature, so he decides to move to New York where he finds himself similarly out of luck. He starts life in New York living the high life but as he runs out of money he ends up in a dingy studio apartment around Washington Square. Slowly the loneliness of his situation starts to fill every crack of his life and he begins to devolve into a more pathetic creature every day. He wakes up in the middle of the night one day and decides to go to the diner for some food. He has reached such a stage where he doesn't even bother to dress, he just throws on a dressing gown and some slippers and walks out the door. At the diner he meets Kay, a thirty something rather unattractive (by his own admission) woman who is equally lonely and at an equally pathetic point in her life.
They begin a fast paced and high strung love affair and within days they are living together, calling his apartment 'our' place and behaving as couples with months or years of history would. Simenon writes from Francois' point of view and does an admirable job describing his desperation, his pathological jealousy and the physical damage that he does to Kay, his subconscious efforts to destroy his relationship and his final coming down to earth.
The story is a fast paced psychological love affair and Simenon writes it brilliantly always conveying the precipitous edge that Francois and Kay are walking as they conduct their relationship. A+.
2 comments:
I have to get into some more of these. Thanks to your reviews, I actually gave one to my brother-in-law for xmas and he totally loved it (Red Snow, the one taking place in occupied France). I think you're going to have to experience your own Roman Dur once you run out of them to read.
Great reviews of these Simenon books. It is funny how publishers tried to sell him as a mystery writer back in the day but he was really more of a writer about the human condition, vis Patricia Highsmith.
I read recently that the New York Review of Books will be publishing some more of his roman durs soon.
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