The Widow in NYRB Classics

Mar 07, 2020 Marie-Therese rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: french-literature, crime-fiction

Tightly woven and atmospheric, this is a good representation of Simenon in non-Maigret mode.

The widow of the title is Tati, a canny, thrifty, middle-aged rural woman most interested in raising animals (rabbits and chickens) for sale and keeping a firm grasp on the property she's partially inherited from her late husband. She has the bad luck to run across an aimless recently released convict on the bus back from the local market and her world quickly falls apart as the stresses of her existing r ...more

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May 03, 2015 Charles Dee Mitchell rated it it was amazing

Shelves: contemporary-lit, crime

Jean is a young man just released from prison. The charge was murder. On a bus traveling through rural France, he catches the eye of an older woman who is returning from market with an ungainly incubator among her purchases. Shortly after she disembarks, Jean has the bus driver stop again and gets off himself. He approaches the woman, Tati, the widow Couderc, and offers to carry the incubator to her home. Over the next 150 pages, a story of sex, guilt, poisonous family machinations, and small-sc Jean is a young man just released from prison. The charge was murder. On a bus traveling through rural France, he catches the eye of an older woman who is returning from market with an ungainly incubator among her purchases. Shortly after she disembarks, Jean has the bus driver stop again and gets off himself. He approaches the woman, Tati, the widow Couderc, and offers to carry the incubator to her home. Over the next 150 pages, a story of sex, guilt, poisonous family machinations, and small-scale farming will work its way toward the murder you can see coming from the moment that eye contact is made on the bus.

The Widow is among the best of Simenon’s romans durs, his novels that do not involve Detective Chief Inspector Maigret of the Parisian Police Judiciare. American readers are likely to equate these romans durs with the noir writing and filmmaking that developed in this country around the same time, the 1930’s, that Simenon began publishing. But there are significant differences in the two terms. Both genres present bleak visions of characters trapped by fates that work like ponderously geared machines to grind them down. But noir writing can also make room for action and black comedy. As Paul Theroux notes in his introduction to this NYRB edition, “…dur is not just hard but implies weight, seriousness, not only a stony quality but density and complexity – a kind of challenge and even a certain tedium.”

The Widow was published in France in 1942, the same year that Albert Camus’ The Stranger began its rise to a permanent place in the Western canon. Both short novels feature “…a conscienceless and slightly creepy young man, unattached and adrift, perpetrator of a meaningless murder.” Theroux rates The Widow the better of the two. Upon their publication, Andre Gide made a similar judgment in favor of Simenon.

In the introduction, Theroux works over the Camus comparison, one that Simenon himself was constantly aware of.

If reading Camus represents duty, Simenon represents indulgence, a lavishness that seems frivolous, inspiring a greedy satisfaction that shows itself as self-consciousness…Professional philistinism dogged Simenon; so did snobbery.

Simenon compared himself to Balzac and fully expected to win the Nobel Prize. That didn’t work out, but with almost all of his 150 plus novels finding new translations and English language editions, a new generation can evaluate his take on the Comedie Humaine.
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May 22, 2011 Jayaprakash Satyamurthy rated it it was amazing

'It was odd: there were forty passengers, and only one of them, the widow Couderc, looked at the man any differently than you would have looked at just anybody.The rest were placid and quiet, as it might be cows in a meadow watching a wolf browsing in their midst without the least astonishment.'

'Twice, and twice only, in the whole of his life, had he known this innocent peace, once when he'd been ill and had ceased to consider school a reality; then again here, this very morning, as he strode to 'It was odd: there were forty passengers, and only one of them, the widow Couderc, looked at the man any differently than you would have looked at just anybody.The rest were placid and quiet, as it might be cows in a meadow watching a wolf browsing in their midst without the least astonishment.'

'Twice, and twice only, in the whole of his life, had he known this innocent peace, once when he'd been ill and had ceased to consider school a reality; then again here, this very morning, as he strode towards the village and waited with the gossips behind the butcher's van...'

A dissolute young man, son of a rich, philandering distiller, kills a man over gambling losses and is sent to jail. Upon his release, he drifts into the orbit of the widow Couderc, a short, solidy-built woman who has spent her life in service to a family that hovers somewhere in the limbo between poverty and stability. Married to the son of the family, and then widowed, she has taken control of the family homestead and the elderly, addled patriarch whom she placates with occasional bouts of sex. The families of her two sisters-in-law vie with her for control of old man Couderc - and the all important homestead. Young Jean, placid and happy to serve as widow Couderc's farmhand, house help and lover, but drawn to her niece, Felicie, finds his attempt to lose himself in bucolic, almost bovine complacency falling apart at the seams and reacts in the only way that he seems to know how. Andre Gide claimed that this novel went 'much further' than Camus' 'The Outsider', and whether or not he was right, this novels certainly goes very far into the somnolent, tender, treacherous depths of a broken human spirit. Simenon had this trick of somehow making you inhabit his characters' heads for the duration, so that he doesn't need to do a lot of extra work to make things clear. As ever, he packs volumes worth of detail and insight into a spare 153 pages. Among the very best of his novels among those I've read so far. ...more

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Feb 19, 2009 Walter rated it liked it

Simenon writes about people in a honest way, but he doesn’t meet his characters, but more he feeds them into their fate, and that takes away from the aesthetic of this book, and his writing.

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