The Man Who Watched Trains Go By by Georges Simenon

 

This captivating page-turner is not a Detective Maigret novel but one Simenon termed roman durs, meaning uncomfortable or hard on the reader. With The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, each chapter begins with a brief epigraph, for example, the epigraph for Chapter 1 reads “In which Julius de Coster the Younger gets drunk at the Little-Saint George, and the impossible suddenly breaches the dykes of everyday life.”

Here's my choice of epigram for the book itself: "The Case of Kees Popinga, or how upon hearing shocking revelations, a well-to-do bourgeois bean counter goes completely berserk."

The first pages provide the setup: One icy December evening in the northern Dutch city of Groningen, forty-year-old family man Kees Popinga walks down to the dock to check on a cargo delivery he scheduled himself in his capacity as head clerk of an esteemed shipping firm. The enraged ship’s captain blasts him because the shipment did not arrived. Nonplussed, Kees strolls by a nearby pub only to see through the window, to his amazement, his boss, Julius de Coster, drinking at a table.

Julius waves for him to come in, and, between swigs of brandy, breezily tells Kees in so many words that he, Mr. Pop-in-ga, is Popinga the Poopstick, prime stooge, a ninny so blind he couldn’t see how he, Julius de Coster, has been embezzling, stealing and cheating for years, not to mention having extramarital sex with former employee Pamela, an attractive young lady everyone in the company, including Kees Popinga, dreamed of going to bed with.

Furthermore, Julius goes on, since he made a bad investment in sugar, the company is now bankrupt and not only will Popinga lose his job but also his life savings, thus his house and all other personal properties. Lowering his voice, Julius also informs Mr. Pop-in-ga that this is the very night he, the well-respected Julius de Coster, will be faking his own suicide and fleeing the country.

Poor Mr. Popinga! Nothing like having your well-ordered, comfortable Dutch bourgeois world come crashing down in a heap of rubble. And how, we may ask, does our staid, conservative shipping clerk react to this disaster? The next morning, he makes his first radical decision: to stay under the covers in bed.

What! Not go to the office, Kees? Mrs. Popinga is shocked, to say the least. Oh, yes, new world, new man. We read: “The important thing was that he felt completely at ease. This was the real him. Yes – this is how he should have acted all along.”

So, for the first time in his adult life Kees Popinga has a taste of tranquility and joy, a state free from agitation and constant worrying, what he recognizes as “the real him” – and for good reason: many the spiritual and philosophical tradition maintaining such a combination of tranquility and joy is, in fact, our birthright, our true nature. As existential psychologist R.D. Laing observed: “Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.”

And then we read: “Kees had always dreamed of being something other than Kees Popinga. That explained why he was so completely the way he was – so completely Kees Popinga – and why he even overdid it. Because he knew that if he gave even an inch, nothing would stop him again.”

In other words, it’s all or nothing.- once the thin shell of rigid identity is even slightly cracked, the entire edifice breaks down. It’s as if, in his own clerkish way, Kees Popinga grasps R.D. Laing’s insight: “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man.”

Kees Popinga finally rouses himself from bed, shaves, showers, dresses and, without telling his wife of his plans, leaves his house and family forever, having resolved to also leave behind his identity as a "normal man."

What follows when he travels to Amsterdam to have sex with Pamela (Julius de Coster bragged about how he set the luscious Pamela up in a particularly posh hotel) and then on to Paris is a truly odd series of events, a story Luc Sante in his Introduction to this New York Review Books (NYRB) edition calls both galling and comic.

This Georges Simenon novel is a penetrating exploration into the psychology of personal identity. How far can Kees Popinga the bean counter free himself from his habit of counting beans (the former shipping clerk continually, almost obsessively, makes entries in a small red leather notebook he happens to find in his jacket pocket)? And how far will the consequences of his actions (for starters, he quite unintentionally kills Pamela) launch him into madness? If you are up for a quizzical existential tale by turns humorous and infuriating, this is your book.



 

Georges Simenon in Paris. Frequently, the author would observe people on the street, pick out an interesting face, usually a man, and imagine him dealing with an unexpected event that would strip him of all comfortable social clothing and push him to the limit.