| The Man Who Watched Trains Go By |
[Feb. 2nd, 2009|07:34 pm] |
 I got some book credit for Christmas as a gift and spent a bit of it recently on three novels by the Belgian crime writer, Georges Simenon. The New York Review of Books has re-issued a number of his standalone thrillers. The first one I read, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, is excellent. It's fast paced with economical writing and an intense phychological study of the protagonist -- Kees Popinga, a man you can't really like but whose story is compelling as hell. Simenon is a fantastic writer, setting a scene expertly with only a few words, and he knows how to play the pace of his story so that it builds steadily. It's a about this fellow Kees, who is the manager of a chandlering company -- outfitters of ships (from fuel to food to liquor). He lives a quiet life with his wife and two children in a nice house and only buys the best of everything. Then he is told one night by his employer that the company is bankrupt and that by the next day Kees will be out of a job. Seems the head of the company has cooked the books and everything now has crashed in on him. He tells Kees that he is going to fake his suicide and take off on a new life. Kees doesn't fake suicide but also splits his quiet town of Groningen with a pocketful of cash given to him by his ex-boss, abandoning his family. He goes first to Amsterdam where by an unpremeditated act kills a prostitute and then on to Paris. His face is in every newspaper in Europe as he moves around Paris, trying to elude the police. As the story progresses, the reader begins to realize that Kees is a bit unstable and always has been, but his respectable life and job have been a way for him to tamp down his frustrations. He reveals himself to be quite an egomaniac, and soon begins writing letters to the Paris police and Newspapers, taunting them and at the same time trying to explain himself. Somehow Simenon makes you feel this great weight of suspense for this totally unlikeable character as he evades danger, even after he attacks another woman in Paris. I'd love to have seen Alfred Hitchcock make a movie of this book, and I'd love to have seen the Joseph Cotten of Shadow of a Doubt play Kees Popinga. One of the blurbs on the backs of one of these Simenon novels I got is about how Simenon's works really strikes to the heart of the whole idea of existentialism but minus the preptentious approaches of Sartre and Camus. For my money, I think that's spot on. The book is a mere 200 pages, if that, but it really packs a wallop. It's very dark with no melodrama at all. What you expect would eventually happen happens but the journey to that inevitability is a real literary treat. Simenon was a very prolific author, having, at one point, written 40 novels in a single year. He is most famous for his recurring detective, Maigret. But supposedly it is these other novels, what he called the "hard" ones that really show him at his best. The other two I have and will read shortly are Dirty Snow and Monsieur Monde Vanishes |
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| Comments: |
The Clockmaker is a great one too. Simenon could write such terse but spot on descriptive prose. If you get a chance track down his "memoir" Three Crimes. It's about two of his friends/associates who go on to become murderers, and how this gets Simenon interested in writing criminals the way he does.
A weird book. It's like something out of the Lost Generation, but written in the backyard behind Surrealism.
From: (Anonymous)
2009-02-03 05:07 am (UTC)
written in the backyard behind Surrealism. | (Link)
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Simenon is great but maybe too abundant. Read too many of them (and there seem to be hundreds) and it gets to be like seeing the magic act once too often.
The surrealism is always lurking. I began to wonder if it was even intentional or just his own wierdness.
He reminds me very much of Jim Thompson - probably because I read Thompson before I read Simenon - in the way their crime fiction abuts dark fantasy and horror.
It's said he wasn't lucky in the movie adaptations of his stuff. I remember as a kid, before I even knew who Simenon was, seeing on late night TV the movie THE MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER directed by Burgess Meredith (before he found immortality as the Joker) and starring Charles Laughton and Franchot Tone. Wild! Senseless! Self Indulgent! Beyond Good and Evil!
Rick Bowes
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/60137713/8065785) | From: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) 14theditch
2009-02-03 05:19 am (UTC)
Re: written in the backyard behind Surrealism. | (Link)
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Rick: I thought Thompson too when I read this. From what I read on the internet, you're not the only to voice the opinion of his work being too similar at times and there being too much of it. I'll be sparing in my reading. This one was really good, though. Oh, yeah, and Meredith was The Penguin. It was Caesar Romero who was the Joker. How can you forget Romero? Had no idea Meredith had been a director. Were there other films beside this one?
From: (Anonymous)
2009-02-03 08:00 am (UTC)
Re: written in the backyard behind Surrealism. | (Link)
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My God, I slipped up on the Burge's career! It's too late for suicide! Doubly stupid since I recently heard again Laurie Anderson's stage piece about the Penguin. He's lonely as a young man and friends fix up a blind date with a young lady who shares his interest in travel via umbrella. The woman is, of course, Marie Poppins and it doesn't work out.
Man On The Eiffel Tower is, I think, the only movie he ever directed. See it once and you'll know why. Of course, I could be wrong.
He had quite a serious stage career back in the 1930's and '40's - Maxwell Anderson blank verse gangster dramas, Of Mice and Men. Kind of over-the-top. The late career in some ways is a parody of the early one.
Rick Bowes
| From: 14theditch
2009-02-03 01:03 pm (UTC)
Re: written in the backyard behind Surrealism. | (Link)
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Rick: I remember Meredith in those triumphs and also as Mick in Rocky, but also as the guy in the Twilight Zone who is a librarian who basically hates people. Well, as it turns out, they drop the big one, everybody dies, he survives and has this huge pile of books to read all by himself. He's happy as hell and then his fucking glasses break. The classic TZ twist.
Didn't know Laurie Andersen did something about the Penguin. I saw her quite a few years ago do a stage thing about Shakespeare's Tempest. It was great.
Justin: Thanks for the tips. The memoir sounds like a good one. I've looked up the Clockmaker. I think if I get that one it will have to be through one of the used sites.
From: (Anonymous)
2009-02-05 01:54 am (UTC)
Man Who Watched The Trains | (Link)
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I just started reading Simenon last year and have read all NYRB editions out so far. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By was filmed with Claude Rains in 1952. I have never seen it. A good film adaption of one of his novels is a French film called Red Lights which came out about 4 years ago.
| From: 14theditch
2009-02-05 01:59 am (UTC)
Re: Man Who Watched The Trains | (Link)
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Thanks for the information. Can you give me a clue as to any of the other NYRB publications of Simenon that you thought were very good? In other words, what were your favorites?
From: (Anonymous)
2009-02-05 09:09 pm (UTC)
Re: Man Who Watched The Trains | (Link)
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I've liked them all but my favorites have been Man Who atched the Trains, Dirty Snow, Monsieur Monde Vanishes and The Widow. I forgot that The Engagement was made into a pretty good film called Mr. Hire.
| From: 14theditch
2009-02-06 04:08 am (UTC)
Re: Man Who Watched The Trains | (Link)
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I'm reading Monsieu Monde now and enjoying it -- mostly the writing. Dirty Snow next. Thanks for the tip on the film. | |
