SIMENON SIMENON "REPORT" - JOHN BANVILLE ON MAIGRET AND THE GENIUS OF GEORGES SIMENON

A new translation of the investigator’s final adventure completes a monument to one of the 20th century’s greatest writers

Belgian writer Georges Simenon in May 1984 © David Montgomery/Getty Image

Financial Times - 10/01/2020 - John Banville - Can there have been, since the ancient Greeks, an artist more resistant to the bacillus of sentimentality than Georges Simenon? His work, both the Maigret series and what he called his romans durs, or “hard novels”, displays a unique blend of stoic detachment and unfailing, all-embracing empathy. It is never sentimental, but abundant in sentiment. One cannot read even the least of the Maigret novels without feeling for, or even at one with, the petites gens who are his subject. Like the Greeks, he has a keen sense of the tragic, yet his characters, in their dogged everydayness, are the opposite of heroic. He refuses to aggrandise life for dramatic effect. His motto, which he gave to his most famous creation, Detective Jules Maigret, was “to understand and judge not”. Which is not at all the same as saying that to understand all is to pardon all, an old saw not sharp enough to cut even the mustard. Georges Simenon, one of the famously few famous Belgians, was born in Liège in 1903. His mother was a dismayingly formidable force who dominated his life for as long as she lived, and probably longer. He was a wild youth, and early learned the pleasures of drink, drugs and the flesh. He ran with a bohemian gang calling itself La Caque, one of whose members, Le petit Kleine, died by hanging, in suspicious circumstances...>>>