A comparison of two novels: “Missing Person” and “M. Monde Vanishes”
SIMENON SIMENON. LES DISPARUS DE MODIANO ET DE SIMENON
Une comparaison entre deux romans: “Rue des Boutiques Obscures” et “La Fuite de M. Monde”
SIMENON SIMENON. GLI SCOMPARSI DI MODIANO E DI SIMENON
Un parallelo tra due romanzi: "Via delle Botteghe Oscure" e "La fuga di M.Monde"

In the Modiano, a long-term amnesiac and private detective, Guy Roland
loses his job and uses this new freedom to try and find his identity,
working from his former agency’s years of files. Multiple mail
addresses, phone numbers, and newspaper articles lead him to strangers
who seem to have known some of his friends. They, in turn, provide him
with enticing clues, including old anecdotes, letters, and photographs.
Hoping to restore concrete memories, whether lost or repressed, and
sometimes seeming to succeed, Roland pursues the histories of these
mysterious characters with differing names, who may in fact have been
him, through France, Switzerland, and the South Pacific. Thwarted again,
he heads for Italy….
In the Simenon, a well-to-do and wealthy businessman, Nobert Monde discovers that “everyone had forgotten” his 48th birthday. Withdrawing his liquid bank assets and shaving off his mustache that very day, he leaves Paris where he had been “frozen” for his entire life and, abandoning his routines, house, family, and company, he escapes to southern France.
Intent on severing any and all ties to live as a free “man on the
street,” Monde surprises himself when he leaps to rescue Julie, a young
bargirl, from suicide. Together, they plunge into a life of debauchery
and dissipation, but even though he loses his hefty bankroll and his
face its healthy color, he acquires the look of “mysterious joy, a sort
of perverse delight.” Through this rock bottom existence with airy and
loose Julie, the opposite of the rigid, tightfisted second wife he left
in Paris, Monde realizes he is a much better, more worthwhile person
than others thought.
When
another “lost animal” surfaces suddenly, Monde surprises himself again
by leaping to her rescue. A hopeless drug addict, she happens to be the
first wife he had divorced long ago. “Suddenly seeing life in another
way, as if aided by some extraordinary x-ray vision,” Monde brings her
to Paris for rehabilitation. But he doesn’t return there because of her;
he goes back for himself. With “a cold serenity” in place of his pre-flight malaise, Monde resumes his daily ways.
At the beginning of these two novels, both men realize they did not fully exist. In looking for himself, Monde didn’t know “where he was going or what he would do” and neither did Roland. During the story, while striving to find out who they were/are, Monde draws closer and closer whereas Roland keeps on falling short. At the end, the reader doesn’t know for sure what the future holds for the two. Yet, it seems Monde has been reborn whereas Roland will continue dead forever.
David P Simmons
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento
LASCIATE QUI I VOSTRI COMMENTI, LE VOSTRE IMPRESSIONI LE PRECISAZIONI ANCHE LE CRITICHE E I VOSTRI CONTRIBUTI.