The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By by Simenon
The Man Who Watced the Trains Go By (1938)
by Georges Simenon, translated by Stuart Gilbert
184 pages - Penguin Books
Kees Popinga lives in a Dutch port town, and is second-in-command at the most prominent outfitting company. He lives a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, with a wife, two children, and a mortgaged house filled with products from all the best brands. This life is shattered when one evening Kees discovers a problem with a delivery, and cannot track down his boss until he finds him getting drunk in a sailor's bar, where the boss informs Kees that he has cooking the books and that tomorrow the company will go bankrupt and the police will be at their heels. The boss fakes his drowning and disappears, but Kees reacts somewhat differently, becoming unresponsive toward his family, and then taking a trip to Paris where he accidentally kills a prostitute, assaults at least one other woman, and plays a game of cat-and-mouse with both the police and newspapers.
Simenon wrote a lot of novels about middle-aged, middle-class men whose life is suddenly turned upside-down, and where they usually attempt to entirely re-create their life, in a new place and with a new style, based entirely upon their own new-found willpower. It's a tribute to Simenon's fidelity to reality that in most of these cases (as far as I have read so far) the protagonist can never fully break with the past. What would really enrich this novel is a deeper examination of either society or the individual, but mostly it feels like a by-the-numbers exercise, where 'this happened, and then that happened...'. The book is lacking in passion, much like the main character, and perhaps, in both cases, that would have made all the difference.
by Georges Simenon, translated by Stuart Gilbert
184 pages - Penguin Books
Kees Popinga lives in a Dutch port town, and is second-in-command at the most prominent outfitting company. He lives a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, with a wife, two children, and a mortgaged house filled with products from all the best brands. This life is shattered when one evening Kees discovers a problem with a delivery, and cannot track down his boss until he finds him getting drunk in a sailor's bar, where the boss informs Kees that he has cooking the books and that tomorrow the company will go bankrupt and the police will be at their heels. The boss fakes his drowning and disappears, but Kees reacts somewhat differently, becoming unresponsive toward his family, and then taking a trip to Paris where he accidentally kills a prostitute, assaults at least one other woman, and plays a game of cat-and-mouse with both the police and newspapers.
Simenon wrote a lot of novels about middle-aged, middle-class men whose life is suddenly turned upside-down, and where they usually attempt to entirely re-create their life, in a new place and with a new style, based entirely upon their own new-found willpower. It's a tribute to Simenon's fidelity to reality that in most of these cases (as far as I have read so far) the protagonist can never fully break with the past. What would really enrich this novel is a deeper examination of either society or the individual, but mostly it feels like a by-the-numbers exercise, where 'this happened, and then that happened...'. The book is lacking in passion, much like the main character, and perhaps, in both cases, that would have made all the difference.