Georges Simenon - a born storyteller capable of typing 60 to 80 pages of well crafted prose in one day. "Some people collect stamps; I collect human beings."
From age 18 to 31 Georges used 17 different noms de plume to pump out over 350 novels and short stories. But this was merely the warm up. Georges then created famous Commissaire Jules Maigret and under his own name penned 75 novels and dozens of short stories featuring his legendary police detective. Upon reaching his early 50s, Georges turned serious and switched to authoring well over 100 novels he termed romans durs - and that's romans durs as in hard or harrowing or, what might be termed, existential.
I'm particularly drawn to existential novels by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, thus I'm a huge fan of Maestro Simenon's romans durs - to date, 16 read and reviewed, 100 to go.
Georges set aside things like religion and politics to zero in on the details of human existence, most particularly the inner life and psychology of his characters. His language is simple; he wanted as many people as possible to read his books - deceptively simple, I might add, since he could compress so much in so few words and every single word counts.
Nowhere is the author's style more in evidence than in The Iron Staircase. The novel's first pages are vintage Simenon: 1953 Paris and we're in a second-floor bedroom apartment over a print/stationary shop where physically ill Etienne, age forty, makes a record of his most recent heart attack.
Piece by piece, we're then given the details of Etienne's living arrangement: for fifteen years he's been married to Louise, owner of the business, inherited from her father, a strong willed, earthy woman he married back when he was 25 and she 32, having lost her first husband due to illness. Etienne and Louise - she stands at the cash register, runs the store, attends to customers, taking frequent breaks to walk up the spiral iron staircase to check on Etienne's health; Etienne, in turn, keeps close track of Louise's every word and movement. "They had lived together for so long that they sometimes felt there was no need to speak." And since Etienne has been in bed with his lingering illness, it was "as though she were watching him from the outside, making a mental note of things of which he himself was unaware."
A tad oppressive and suffocating for certain, prompting us to ask: What brought the couple to this point? We're given the backstory: As a young man, before his marriage, Etienne worked as a traveling salesman for a paper/stationary company, As part of making his rounds in Paris, he met Louise running her store. Louise was married at the time, her husband's name was Guillaume Gatin, but then he became dreadfully ill, so much so that when Gatin died in the bedroom at the top of the iron staircase, he weighed no more than a child of ten.
The manner in which Georges Simenon builds Etienne's character is the work of master craft: Etienne must deal with his boredom, his loneliness, his mounting agitation. And his existential alienation: "He felt as though his face were no longer part of him, as though his features, hard and set, no longer reflected his emotions. His eyes were expressionless, fixed in a stupefied stare."
But then on top of everything else, Etienne reflects on Guillaume Gatin's death and starts to put two and two together - his distrust grows to the point where he suspects Louise has been poisoning him. Unbeknownst to his wife, he consults a doctor who conducts a test. And the results of the test are: yes! large quantities of arsenic. What's to be done? To find out, you will have to read this Simenon for yourself.
The young author at his typewriter. Georges Simenon, 1903-1989
"He was suddenly panic-stricken. If he had known how, he would have kept their guests from leaving. He knew that nothing would happen, nothing could happen. There would just be the two of them, shut in together, spying on each other." - Georges Simenon, The Iron Staircase
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