The Belgian author’s genius comes to the fore in a dark domestic drama
T
he more one reads of Georges Simenon, the stranger the writer and his writings become. His novels, most of them composed in a week or two, are simple, straightforward, shallow-seeming even, but below the surface lie dark and fathomless depths.
Many readers will know him as the creator of Commissioner Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, the most unpretentious, humane and convincing of the great fictional detectives. However, his finest work is to be found in what he called his romans durs, or hard novels, including such masterpieces as Dirty Snow, Monsieur Monde Vanishes and the jauntily horrifying The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By. Now, Penguin Classics has launched a series of 20 of the romans durs in new translations, starting with The Cat, originally published in French in 1967.
The plot focuses on a Parisian couple, the retired builder Émile Bouin and his wife, Marguerite. Both were widowed, and remarried in their 60s. Theirs is not a match made in heaven. Indeed, they inhabit a domestic hell in a claustrophobic Parisian cul-de-sac, where they spend their days devising means of taunting and tormenting each other in a battle of wills that can only end in tragedy. They are no longer on speaking terms, and only communicate, if that is the word, by exchanging the briefest of notes.
