Harriet Devine's Blog

Maigret Takes the Waters by Simenon (The 1968 Club)

I almost never participate in reading challenges, but I'm always more than happy to join in Simon and Kaggsy's Year Clubs. I'm not sure why they appeal to me so much, but I do love a vintage read and the clubs provide a focus for exploring unknown territory. With this one we are moving closer to the present day - many people reading this will actually have been born by then! It's also the so-called Swinging Sixties, the decade of turning on, tuning in, dropping out - though neither of the books I chose to read seem to reflect any of this. 

Simenon published a rather staggering total of seventy-six novels and twenty-eight short stories featuring his memorable pipe-smoking detective, starting in 1931 and ending in 1972. This one was published in France as Maigret à Vichy in 1968 and translated into English for the first, and apparently the last, time in 1969. As Penguin is setting out to publish new translations of all the novels, let's hope this one appears soon. Meanwhile I had to make do with a 1971 reprint of the first translation.

I haven't read anywhere near the whole series, but it's my impression that Maigret doesn't really age much, despite the forty years of his literary lifespan. It's true that a novel published in 1945 is called Maigret in Retirement, but he appears to keep going anyway in the numerous subsequent books. Here, we learn that he's fifty-three, and we find him in need of a bit of rest and recuperation - he's been overworking, suffers from indigestion, sleeps badly, and is generally a bit under the weather. His doctor examines him and considers he's not in too bad shape, but advises him to visit the celebrated spa town of Vichy. Just over four hours south of Paris, the town has had a rather tarnished reputation, having been the headquarters of the collaborationist Nazi government during WW2. By the late 1960s, however, all this was in the past, and the town had become a hugely popular resort, with thirteen cinemas, eight dance halls and three theatres. Everyone, from crowned heads to the wealthy bourgeoisie, flocked there in order to 'take the waters' - the local springs have been known for their apparently curative powers since Roman times. 

On arrival, accompanied of course by Madame Maigret, the detective is prescribed his daily routine. In the morning:

I want you to have three half-pints of water at half-hourly intervals, and it should be drunk as hot as you can take it. I want you to repeat the process in the afternoon at about five, at the Chomel spring. Don't worry if yo feel a bit languid the first day. It's a purely temporary effect of the treatment...

The Maigrets are staying in a comfortable hotel , and soon find themselves falling into a pleasant, relaxing routine, including a great deal of walking - 'They had never walked so much in their entire lives'. Maigret takes great pleasure in watching the people around them - he's never bored because he plays at detection, classifying people, wondering what they do for a living, and diagnosing their illnesses by observing what they eat. They are particularly intrigued by a woman they call the lady in lilac.  She always attends the same evening concerts as they do, drinks a small amount of the waters in the morning, and aways has an air of aloof dignity. But towards the end of the first week, they make a surprising discovery: the lady in lilac has been murdered, strangled in the house she owned just a couple of streets away from their hotel.

When the police arrive, they are headed by Lecoeur, the Divisional Superintendent from nearby Clermont-Ferrand, who turns out to be an old acquaintance of Maigret's.  Although Maigret can't act in any official capacity, naturally the local police are ready to turn to him and benefit from his thoughts and advice on the murder of the woman, whose name turns out to be Hélène Lange. He learns of her solitary life, her estrangement from her more flighty younger sister, her previous residences in Paris and in Nice. He follows his usual routine of taking the waters twice a day and going for walks, but all the time he is musing on this mysterious woman, and trying to work what it could have been in her past that finally caught up with her. He has long discussions with Lecoeur, both of them puffing away at their pipes. Eventually, Hélène Lange's killer takes on a definite shape in Maigret's mind:

He was somewhere in this town, possibly on one of the promenades where the Maigrets so often walked. He was going through more or less the same motions as themselves, seeing the same sights, the sailing boats, the pedal boats, the yellow chairs in the park, and the constant ebb and flow of the crowds in the parks and gardens.

It's only a matter of time till he homes in on the right person, and hears what is essentially a sad story of lies and self-deception. The case is over, and so is Maigret's cure. His health has improved, but he's left feeling regrets about the ruined life of the person who was driven to commit this crime. 

All this observing, pipe-smoking, and musing are pretty much standard in Maigret's methodology - you don't go to one of these novels for fantastic furious action. He works things out eventually in his own head. But I was particularly charmed here by the snapshot of life in Vichy at the height of its popularity, the leisurely mornings lingering over breakfast coffee, croissants, and a newspaper, the strolls through town, the cultural activities, and of course the prescribed taking of the waters. Let's hope a new edition of this is going to appear before too long.

Woman Reading

This is 'Il Romanzo' (the novel), painted in 1911 by the Italian artist Camillo Innocenti (1871-1961). What little I have discovered about him can be found by following the link to Wikipedia.

Woman with Book

Actually (and slightly mysteriously) called 'Reader on a Black Background' this was painted in 1918 by the sublime French artist Henri Matisse (1869-1954).

What's happened to my reviewing?

 Anyone who ever reads my blog, if there are such people, may have noticed that it's ages since I reviewed any books. Over a month in fact, the longest time I've ever gone without a posting a review on here. I've written some reviews over on Shiny - most recently Laura Wilson's brilliant black comedy thriller The Other Woman, also Maggie O'Farrell's memoir I Am I Am I Am and Jane Harris's wonderful new novel Sugar Money. I've also just turned in a review of a non-fiction book that turned out to be a real page-turner - Shaun Greenhalgh's A Forger's Tale - the review will be coming up on there fairly soon. But, though I've read, or listened to, other books as well, nothing has grabbed me enough to get me writing about it. I don't like telling you about my disappointments and rarely review anything I didn't much like. 

However, I thought I might just mention the most recent less than wonderful experience - The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye, the second continuation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy by David Lagerkrantz. Taking on the mantle of a deceased writer is a pretty tricky business. I've been an admirer of Sophie Hannah's psychological thrillers since the beginning, for example, but didn't enjoy her two Poirot books nearly so much. I did, though, quite like Lagerkrantz's first Larsson spin off, The Girl in the Spider's Web, which I reviewed on here and on Shiny a couple of years ago. So I was looking forward to hearing more about what Lisbeth Salander was up to this time round. Not a lot, is the simple answer. For a good deal of the story she's incarcerated in prison for something she did in the previous novel, though everyone seems to think that was a bit unfair, and eventually they let her out early. While she's inside, she takes on some of the unfairness and bullying that is rife in the institution, defending Faria, a young Muslim woman, imprisoned for attacking the killer of her lover, from the vicious attacks of a terrifying woman known as Benito, who is terrorising the inmates. 

This is  a sort of triple-plotted novel. As well as the current adventures of Lisbeth, we also get Faria's story, told in flashbacks, and a rather interesting though only slimly related account of a strange and cruel genetic experiment involving pairs of identical twins, who are deliberately separated at birth and then studied to see how similarly they develop apart. Lisbeth and her sister Camilla (who appeared in the last novel but doesn't do so here) were considered as likely subjects but this didn't actually happen as they lived with their mother. The twins who are the focus here are Leo, who has been raised in a wealthy and cultured family, and Daniel, who was brought up in an abusive home on a remote country farm. I actually found this the most interesting part of the novel, but here, and in general throughout the book, there were far too many improbabilities in the plot to make it truly satisfying. All rather disappointing. I listened to it on Audible and found my concentration wavering quite a bit. 

So - I'm just hoping I'll eventually find something to read that I really enjoy enough to tell you about it. Meanwhile, apologies for the silence.

Woman Reading Newspaper

This is a detail from a painting called 'Hide and Seek' (c.1877) by the French artist James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836-1902).

Here's what my source said about it:

After Kathleen Newton entered his home in about 1876, Tissot focused almost exclusively on intimate, anecdotal descriptions of the activities of the secluded suburban household, depicting an idyllic world tinged by a melancholy awareness of the illness that would lead to her death in 1882. The artist’s companion reads in a corner as her nieces and daughter amuse themselves.

And here's more info from Wikipedia:

In 1875-6, Tissot met Kathleen Newton, a divorcee who became the painter's companion and frequent model. He composed an etching of her in 1876 entitled Portrait of Mrs N., more commonly titled La frileuse.^[1] She gave birth to a son, Cecil George Newton in 1876, who is believed to be Tissot's son. She moved into Tissot's household in St. John's Wood in 1876 and lived with him until her death in the late stages of consumption in 1882. Tissot frequently referred to these years with Newton as the happiest of his life, a time when he was able to live out his dream of a family life

Woman Reading

This is 'A Quiet Hour' by the American artist Isaac Henry Caliga (1857-1934). He started life in a rather simple way, working in a dry-goods store, and became a celebrated society and portrait artist. The focus of this painting is perhaps meant to be the woman sewing, but we are more interested in books here. Anyway, it's a delightfully peaceful picture of settled domestic life.

Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss (Guest post)

At Shiny New Books we are really proud of our reviewers. They're a fantastic team and we trust them implicitly. But, as anyone who writes reviews will recognise, sometimes they encounter a book they really expected to love and find they just can't. The problem here for Shiny is that we are a 'book recommendations magazine', so, though we don't mind a few quibbles, we draw the line at reviews that criticise the book too much. So when Lucy Unwin recently found she couldn't write positively enough about Nicole Krauss's latest novel, we reluctantly decided not to use her otherwise great review. I offered to host it on my blog and you can read it below. Lucy's interview with Nicole did make it to Shiny and here it is.

Forest Dark, by Nicole Krauss.

Full disclosure: I love Nicole Krauss. I have a history with her. It started when I randomly bought The History of Love on the way to live in the Chilean city of Valparaiso, only to realise later that part of the novel is set there. My husband and I have bonded over her. My daughter is named after one of her characters. I am evangelical about her work in the most annoying of ways. I came to this book open, ready and determined to love it. I did not. 

I had also assumed this review would centre around around the inevitable comparisons to Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest tome Here I Am. As her ex-husband’s work –– about a pre-divorce Brooklynite coming to terms with his life, broken relationships, his understanding of Judaism and connection to Israel –– bears a certain resemblance to this book (about a pre-divorce Brooklynite coming to terms with her life, broken relationships, her understanding of Judaism and connection to Israel.) But it doesn’t. There is just too much more jaw-to-the-floor strangeness about Forest Dark to waste time on that. 

Because this is a novel about how much the author hates novels, hates writing them, and probably hates us for reading them. Or so it seems.*

Under the cover of the “fictional” main character –– lets call her ‘Nicole’ (because that’s her name) –– real Nicole is very open about this. Her character says: “I wanted to write what I wanted to write, however much it offended, bored, challenged or disappointed people.” How’s that for setting out your stall?

You get a sense that she has come to see fiction writing as trifling, and is not prepared to indulge it. Fictional Nicole be-moans that everyone’s an artist these days. In her books she feels the “degree of artifice” has become greater that the “degree of truth.” Even reading stories to her kids at bedtime she feels she’s stifling them by presenting their young minds with such conventional narrative structures.

Instead Nicole Krauss sets about deconstructing the novel and dares her readers to come with her. As Fictional Nicole says: “It is never really a novel that one dreams of writing, but something far more encompassing for which one uses the word novel to mask delusions of grandeur or a hope that lacks clarity.”

And so to the great un-masking. That she has followed this dream so boldly fills me with admiration. It’s an ambitious and fascinating experiment, and I’m slightly in awe. But oh my goodness does it make for a frustrating and joyless read!

“Why had I really come to Tel Aviv?” Fictional Nicole wonders, quite a way into the book. “In a story, a person always needs a reason for the things she does… Narrative cannot sustain formlessness.”

WHY DID YOU COME TO TEL AVIV? I NEED A REASON! I shout at the book.

She goes on, “Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence and disorder must be obscured.”

It’s at this point I realise it’s going to be a very long haul. 

That’s at 23% according to my Kindle. At 41% Fictional Nicole is amazed she’s started questioning hotel housekeepers, “so I might discover that there was a story here after all.” (The housekeeper’s response? “No English.”) At 57% the other main character, Epstein, observes: “And now other things would have to happen.” Uh-huh. 

It’s at 63% that I first suspect (perhaps mistakenly) the budding shoots of an actual narrative. (Up to here, Fictional Nicole and Epstein have separately found themselves at the Tel Aviv Hilton, both searching for some indefinable thing, and both being led on some indefinable quest. This is where a delightful supposition about Kafka pops up.)

Nicole Krauss appears to so disdain the narrative form, that Forest Dark often feels more like non-fiction. And not just because of the autobiographical undertones. Some passages –– especially those on Kafka, or the descriptions of Freud’s theories –– feel like university essays. At another time she describes the content of a radio programme, on the multiverse theory, that Fictional Nicole was listening to while doing the dishes:

“That as a result of the gravitational waves that occurred in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang –– or a series of Big Bang repulsions, as evidence now suggests –– the early universe experienced an inflation that caused an exponential expansion of the dimensions of space to many times the size of our own cosmos, creating completely different universes with unknown physical properties, without stars, perhaps, or atoms, or light, and that, taken all together, these comprise the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy.”

It somewhat stems the narrative flow. 

The physicist on the radio, apparently, had a “mesmerizing voice,” perhaps that’s what we’re missing here.

The main trouble is that this language seeps through the whole book. Even a charming anecdote about two kids diving in a swimming pool becomes: 

“As for what happened next, I have no explanation for it. Or none beyond the possibility that the laws we cling to in order to assure ourselves that all is as it seems be have occluded a more complex view of the universe, one that forgoes the comfort of squeezing the world to fit the limited reach of our comprehension.”

Spoiler: her brother found an earring.

Only one page later Krauss summarises the same thought with all the concise poetic beauty I love her for: “...the accordion folds tucked beneath the surface of all that appears to be flat.” But these flashes of old Krauss are rarer than I’d like.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to like. It may feel much less lyrical and poetic than her earlier work, as though this decoration has been deemed unnecessary and stripped, but occasionally the odd image flowers up, like this one: “Maya … woke in the night feeling a tremor along the invisible line that still connected her to her father.” Or the perfect precision of her language shines, like here: “Epstein was very polished. He was not refined –– he had no wish to lose his impurities –– but he had been brought to a high shine.” And she paints some wonderfully lucid portraits of intimacy.

And I LOVE, in quite a giddy way, it’s shameless adoption of unlikeability. It a world where both female authors and female characters are under pressure to be ‘likeable’ Nicole Krauss doesn’t seem to care in the slightest. She doesn’t paint herself as someone to like, and, to be honest, she doesn’t seem to like her readers that much either. Are either of these things relevant to the quality of her literature? No. It’s bold. As is the existential quest at the centre of this book.

I admire what she’s trying to do, and I’m very glad she tried to do it. But … I just didn’t enjoy reading it very much. I remain affectionately bewildered by it. I still love Nicole Krauss. If you ask who my favourite author is, it’s still her. Please go out and read Great House, or The History of Love, or even this, but you’ll need a braver, more intellectual, approach than I could manage.

Lucy blogs at thosepreciousstolenmoments - do go over and check it out.

Woman and Book

No, she's not reading it. This is 'Far Niente' (Do Nothing), painted in 1872 by the Scottish artist William Quiller Orchardson (1832-1910). I'm feeling a bit like this myself today - I've just got back from a two week holiday to find lots of things I should be doing, including writing some reviews but somehow can't raise much energy and enthusiasm. Hope this is only temporary!