Word: simenon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Such questions would be revealing if, like the chiaroscuro in a portrait, the answers would illuminate her character; instead, they reiterate the obvious or spurious. Simenon continues laboriously to try to understand his mother...
...imprecise: she is "highstrung," or "willful," or "impressionable." Once he goes so far as to describe her as the "cat's canary" of the family. This murky cliche is repeated several times, as if to emphasize that it is a "key" to solving the mystery of Mme. Simenon. By page 90 (the book is 91 pages), Simenon is ready to terminate his garbled investigation, now thoroughly redundant, and give us his solution. It seems, finally, that she "needs to be good", in spite and in face of the world, and this is the reason she acted as she did, this...
...Simenon's failure here is due to the lack of any coherent understanding of the craft of writing--or in this case, dictating, which only resembles real writing insofar as it is printed. Simenon starts with only the vaguest notions of what he will do and after a certain prescribed period of time (in the case of Letters to My Mother, one day), finishes. In that time a simple story-line emerges, sustained by the most elementary event-to-event, casual thinking. Ironically this dearth of complexity is the peculiar strength of his roman policier: the name Maigret itself connotes...
UNFORTUNATELY, neither thinness of intellect nor haste in production are suitable to the treatment of the human psyche. Human beings are not constructible puzzles. The great disappointment with Letters to My Mother lies in its unfulfilled potential. After all, Mme. Simenon seems to be a genuinely mysterious personage: a woman who could live with her husband for years and never speak a word to him so intense was her hatred; a woman so distrustful that even as she lay dying, she could doubt her son's motives and ask, "Georges, why have you come...
Through the entire book, there is the elusive suggestion of momentous questions, of Oedipal relations, of age, of the child's world, of death. We should take a clue from Gide: to be able to read Simenon with interest is to read between the lines, to make a creative extrapolation. By itself, Letter to My Mother is the maudlin nostalgia of an old man; however, with a bit of imagination on the reader's part, the roman policier mentality can be the catalyst to other, more serious reflections...