Simenon’s Island of Bad Dreams

In Monsieur Monde Vanishes, one of the finest of what Simenon called his romans durs, or “hard” novels, the eponymous central character, a successful, middle-aged Parisian businessman, simply walks out of his life one day, without a word to anyone, including his wife and family. He takes a train to Marseilles and checks into an anonymous hotel, and next morning wakes from a dream in which he seemed to be weeping copiously and talking to himself:

He was speaking without moving his lips, for which he had no need. He was telling of his infinite aching weariness, which was due not to his journey in a train but to his long journey as a man.

He was ageless now. He could let his lips quiver like a child’s.

“Always, for as long as I can remember, I’ve had to make such efforts …”

It is a quintessential Simenon crise, in which a man who has spent his life in servitude to family, work, society, suddenly lays down his burden—“Lord, how tired he was now!”—and determines to live for the moment, and for himself, in full acceptance of the existential peril his decision will expose him to.

Simenon understood well the desperation of Monsieur Monde, and of the many other similar characters he created, in the Maigret crime novels as well as in the romans durs. Simenon was a driven creature, who in his lifetime wrote more than four hundred books, drank and womanized incessantly, and, in his younger days, roamed the world in frantic search of he knew not what. His mother despised him; his long-suffering wife wrote a roman à clef in which she portrayed him as a rampaging egotist—“His voice rang through the house from morning to night, and when he was out it was as though the silence was awaiting his return.” Most calamitous of all, his daughter Marie-Jo, who adored and idolized him—as a child she asked him one day to buy her a gold wedding ring—killed herself at the age of twenty-five. He was, all his life, a spirit in flight from others and from himself, and he is present, often lightly disguised, in every one of his books.

In The Mahé Circle, one of the romans durs translated now into English for the first time, the man on the run is François Mahé, or Dr. Mahé, as he is designated throughout, a small-town general practitioner whom we first meet holidaying with his family on the island of Porquerolles in the south of France, off the coast from Hyères. Dr. Mahé is suffering from a sense of general dissatisfaction. Since he was a child, he feels, “one could almost say that other people had been living his life for him.”

He found that at thirty-five, here he was, too big, too fat, too full of rather vulgar life, with a wife and two children and an existence all laid out for him, a fixed schedule worked out for every day of the week.

In short, he is bound to his family, which includes his mother, who lives with him still and who, “even today, … woke him in the morning, and told him when to change his underclothes.” The portrait of Madame Mahé, sketched in with the lightest yet most telling of strokes, shows Simenon at his sparest and best:

She had a very gentle air about her. Her voice was soft. She looked after everyone, watched over everything, sat up at night with the children when they were ill.

All the same, he was afraid of her.

Porquerolles, where Mahé, his wife, and children are holidaying for the first time, proves to be less than a paradise; in fact, Mahé feels that on the island “things were hostile to him.” The sun is too hot, the sea too glaring, there are scorpions on land and grotesque conger eels in the water; it is “as if there was a tremendous chaos around him, a kind of life that was too vivid.” Then one day he is summoned to a squalid room in a disused barracks outside the village to attend a sick woman who has been living there with her roustabout husband, a former Foreign Legionnaire, and their three children. By the time he arrives, however, the woman has died. As he looks about the room, Mahé catches sight of “a red patch: a young girl, in a dress as scarlet as a flag, her thin legs bare, crouching in a corner, against the wall.”

It seems a commonplace moment in a doctor’s life, and Mahé hardly gives a second thought to the woman’s death, or to the glimpse of her daughter in the red dress. The unsatisfactory holiday comes to an end and, relieved, the family returns home to Saint-Hilaire to resume their everyday lives. However, the image of that patch of red in the corner of the squalid room in which the woman died has lodged itself immovably in the dark reaches of Dr. Mahé’s mind. The best part of a year passes, and suddenly one Sunday in June when he is sitting in his garden, “his belly in front of him, because they had lunched well,” he finds that his “feeling of well-being was turning into a malaise.”

What can be the matter? This year, it has been decided, the family for its annual holiday will return to the boarding house on the banks of the Sèvre that they had frequented for years, before the disastrous mistake that was Porquerolles. Yet now, on this strange and disturbing Sunday afternoon, Dr. Mahé hears himself announcing that they will, instead, go back to the island. The notion causes consternation, and drives the doctor’s timid and complaisant wife to tears: “She had been crying, sniffling rather, because she wasn’t capable of whole-hearted distress.” However, Mahé will not be moved: Porquerolles it will be. “And as he stood [in front of a mirror] looking at himself, his lips parted in a smile, a smile he had not seen for a long time, literally the smile of a little boy who has got his way.”

Not that he clearly understands himself or his reasons for insisting on returning to a place where they all, himself included, had been so discomforted and unhappy. Looking out from the bow of the ferry as he approaches the island for the second time, “he would willingly have turned back, like his wife, but for different reasons.”

Down there in the south was a hostile [that word again] world, a world so foreign to him that he felt quite lost. The island itself. Its throbbing heat as if in a belljar under the sun, the scorpion in his son’s bed, the deafening sound of the cicadas.

Of course, we are aware of what it is that has brought him back, as is he, without admitting it to himself. Georges Simenon knew about many things, but the thing he knew most about was the nature of obsession. The persistence of Dr. Mahé’s memory of the girl and her red dress is uncanny—indeed, the image of the dress, which Simenon merely mentions a few times, almost in passing, has the nightmarish vividness of the child-sized red raincoat in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. And just as in that movie the main character ended up destroyed, so too will Mahé meet his nemesis on the island of his—bad—dreams.

The Mahé Circle is a sort of masterpiece; one says “sort of” because the book does not call itself to our attention in any purely literary way. Simenon’s uniqueness is that he created high literature in seemingly low forms. This novel, like most of the romans durs, reads like a piece of pulp fiction: it is brief, fast-paced, with an air of the slapdash that is, however, wholly deceptive. True, Simenon wrote fast, and revised little. Yet his artistry is supreme. The account in this book of old Madame Mahé’s descent into illness and death is a sublime piece of writing, as good, in its unforced and unemphatic way, as anything in Proust or even Flaubert.

Mahé himself is a wonderfully realized, appalling creation, but even more impressive are the minor characters, Mahé’s wife, for instance, who is barely noticed in the narrative and yet is entirely alive, or the father of the girl in the red dress, Frans Klamm, “as docile as a beast of burden”:

He did what he was asked. He was the servant at everyone’s beck and call. People threw him coins. Or invited him on board a boat to finish up the remains of a stew. He would eat slowly, always sitting very still, and his gestures were oddly delicate, even if he was eating with his fingers.

Chapeau, cher Maitre!

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Tờ Books, Avril 2013, có 1 bài phạng Zweig tơi bời xí oắt, và tự hỏi, hà cớ làm sao 1 mà ông văn chương dở như hạch, lại được ca thấu trời.

ZWEIG, CE PEPSI DE LA LITTERATURE

A quoi est due l'immense popularité dont continue de jouir Stefan Zweig? A une sorte de talent hollywoodien fait pour plaire à la bourgeoisie inculte. Les Mann, Musil et autres Canetti ne s'y trompaient pas, qui le couvraient de leur mépris. Un poète anglais d' origine allemande enfonce le clou dans cet article d'une rare méchanceté qui fracasse aussi la statue morale de l'humaniste.

MICHAEL HOFMANN. London Review of Books.

Valentine's Day, 2013
Valentine's Last Year

MY GIFT TO YOU

My gift to you will be an abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you'll perceive it
only after many years have passed
and you are far from Mexico and me.
You'll find it when you need it most,
and that won't be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you'll remember me,
if only just a little.
Roberto Bolano
The Paris Review Summer 2012

Xuống phố, đổi phim, ghé tiệm sách, mua số The Paris Review có bài thơ tuyệt vời của Bolano, tả đúng tâm sự Gấu, đúng cái cảnh tình cờ gặp lại Em, khi Em đi chợ Bến Thành, về, và “kín đáo” nói cho biết, tại làm sao Em vờ Gấu, và chọn một anh bồ, cùng học Y Khoa.

Quà BHD tặng Gấu

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Chân Dung

Cái đẹp là cây đoản kiếm xoáy vô ngực, hay tâm hồn độc giả

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Tribute to Phạm  Duy

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Ghi chú trong ngày

Marine biology
Flea market
A newly discovered virus may be the most abundant organism on the planet
"Trùng độc", virus, đầy rẫy trong chốn giang hồ gió tanh mưa máu!

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Viết bên lề "Bên Thắng Nhục

Will Geography Decide Our Destiny?

Bài gãi đúng chỗ ngứa [vết thương hình chữ S] của Gấu Cà Chớn!
Sự trả thù của địa dư cũng là sự trả thù của những giống dân Hời, Chiêm... đã bị  giống dân Mít làm cỏ trong suốt lịch sử dựng nước của nó.
Khi hết kẻ thù thì nó đè thằng em Nam Bộ ra “phán, trảm, làm thịt, đưa đi cải tạo mút mùa lệ thuỷ….”

Bài này NYRB đếch cho đọc free. Tin Văn se scan, và dịch sau, hầu độc giả, thay vì kiếm đọc Bên Thắng Nhục!

Nhìn mắt cô bé, là bạn biết có cái gì làm phiền cô.
Có cái gì không đúng

V/v Valentine’s Day

Haunting eyes and a tattered garment tell the plight of a girl who fled Afghanistan for a refugee camp in Pakistan.
Afghan Border, Pakistan | Steve McCurry | 1984
It was just a quick portrait of a schoolgirl in an Afghan refugee camp. But this photograph by Steve McCurry is among the most powerful images in National Geographic's history. McCurry suggests that she captivates because of her look of "hopeless beauty.”  
        "It's clear that she's poor," he says. "Her face is dirty; her garment is ripped; yet she has dignity and confidence and fortitude. In her eyes you could sense that there was something troubling her, something not quite right. She's seen more than she should at such a young age. Her village had been bombed and her relatives killed, and she'd had to make this two-week trek through the mountains to the refugee camp.”
        Seventeen years after making the portrait, McCurry returned to Afghanistan, hoping to find out whether the girl was still alive-and to finally learn her name. Sharbat Gula, now a grown woman, had survived. "When we found her, we knew it was her,” he says. "They wanted to do a check by examining a picture of the iris of her eye against the iris of the original picture, but we all knew it was her. The best part was being able to help make her life better. There was a school built in Kabul based on donations collected from that picture.”

Trong mắt của cô bé có vẻ dò hỏi, có điều gì làm rộn cô, có điều gì không đúng, tại sao mi nhìn ta như thế, hình như mi muốn kiếm 1 cái gì đó ở nơi ta, hình như mi lầm ta với 1 cái gì đó...
Khi gặp BHD, Gấu nhận ra liền, tuổi thơ của thằng cu Bắc Kỳ, nhà quê, thấp thoáng ở trong dáng đi, nụ cuời ánh lên mầu da đen nhẻm cùng với chiếc răng khểnh của Em, là vậy.
Ngoài ra, còn là nỗi ước mong, BHD cầm giữ suốt cuộc đời còn lại của Gấu!
Hà, hà!

Nhưng, bằng cách nào mà BHD lại ‘thấu thị’ ra tất cả, và, bèn bỏ Gấu, và vừa đi vừa ngoái lại, lắc đầu:
Mi đâu có thương yêu gì ta! Mi thương một đứa con nít 11 tuổi, là ta đời thuở nào, và Hà Nội của mi ở trong con bé con đó!

She's seen more than she should at such a young age. Cô bé nhìn thấy nhiều hơn nhiều so với tuổi của cô.
Ui chao, đúng như thế. Thê thảm đúng như thế 

Mi “THNM” rồi, nhìn đâu cũng thấy VC!
Nếu không, thì là... BHD!
Hà, hà! 

Rõ ràng là cô bé nghèo. Mặt cô nhem nhuốc, quần áo tơi tả, tuy nhiên, có cái gọi là phẩm hạnh, sự tin tưởng….
Ui chao, cũng vẫn là những dòng viết về BHD, lần đầu GCC gặp. Sau này, mỗi lần nhớ, là nhớ luôn câu nói tâm sự của Em, đi học chỉ có mỗi một cái áo dài trắng, mấy đứa bạn nói sau lưng, con bé này giả bộ, nhà nó giầu lắm...

Lần Gấu qua Cali thăm bạn, một đấng phán, mày sướng thật, vì gặp được BHD. Không có BHD, chắc gì mày đã là mày?
Ố là là, nghe sướng điên lên được! (1)