SIMENON SIMENON "REPORT" - THE EXTRAORDINARY GEORGES SIMENON

The American Conservative - 29/05/2020 - Micah Mattix - In The London Review of Books, John Lanchester writes that we don’t know exactly how many books Georges Simenon wrote. He published his first at 18—a semi-humorous novel partly “set in a chemist’s shop which specialised in laxatives for pigeons,” as Patrick Marnham described it. There are 75 Maigret novels, 150 pulp works, and 20 autobiographies dictated after he retired from writing. According to Penguin, he has written over 400 books. What is striking is how consistently good those books are: Pietr the Latvian and The Carter of ‘La Providence’ were both published in 1931. That’s something they also have in common with The Late Monsieur Gallet, The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, A Man’s Head, The Yellow Dog, Night at the Crossroads, A Crime in Holland, The Grand Banks Café (Au Rendez-vous des Terre-Neuvas – the only case where the new series’s policy of translating the titles faithfully breaks down) and The Dancer at the Gai Moulin. Ten novels in one year; the next year he published seven more. The books aren’t long – for the most part they clock in at a little over 30,000 words – but this was nonetheless an extraordinary burst of creative energy on the part of the 28-year-old Simenon. The writing method was as extraordinary as the books. A Maigret novel came on Simenon like an illness: he would feel the pressure of an idea building to a point where he had no choice but to write it. At that stage he would go to his doctor for a check-up, then shut himself up in a room and write flat out until the novel was finished. This would take around seven days, plus two for revision. Each book is a delirium, a sweatbox, a spell trapped on a desert island. The bizarre thing is that for Simenon they may also have represented a welcome easing-off and...>>>