"Now I'm afraid to run into him on the stairs!" cried the concierge. "I've always been scared of him. Everyone's scared!"
No question about it, Mr.
Hire gives everyone the creeps, especially the men and women in his
seedy apartment building, and most especially after a prostitute is
brutally murdered just two blocks away.
And Mr. Hire doesn’t have to metamorphose into a giant Gregor Samsa-like bug; being a loner, an outsider who looks the way he does - short flabby body, round staring eyes, puffy waxen face, curled moustache as if it drawn on with India ink - is all he needs to mark him as a loathsome pervert, almost subhuman, the perfect murder suspect. And since he also served a prison term for trafficking in pornography and currently ekes out a living by his scam mail order business, police and state officials judge Mr. Hire guilty on all counts until (fat chance, haha) proven innocent.
Engagement was published in 1933 when Georges Simenon was thirty-years-old, the same age range as when Albert Camus wrote The Stranger, Franz Kafka wrote Metamorphosis and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Nausea. What is it about existential themes and that time in a sensitive author's life? And Simenon’s Engagement is all about existential themes, mainly fear and alienation. The prominence of fear prompted me to include the above film still from Czeck director Zbyněk Brynych’s 1964 The Fifth Horseman is Fear. The film's title could have been this novel's title.
Georges Simenon is best known for all his many novels featuring Detective Maigret, sometimes referred to as the French Sherlock Holmes. Well, unlike Maigret or Homes, there’s nothing appealing about the detectives in Engagement; quite the contrary, they are portrayed as cartoonish dolts, a gaggle of self-centered brutes who slug down booze or seek out quick sex, seeking not justice but simply closing the case so they can move on. And the police commissioner is hardly any better – the way Simenon sketches Mr. Hire under interrogation (and dehumanization) is both chilling and deeply disturbing.
On the subject of drinking booze, the detectives hardly have the exclusives. At every turn the men and woman in the novel sit down with a bottle or glass morning, noon or night, downing drink after drink. It’s as if liquor goes hand in hand and is the sordid complement with hearts constricted, cold and calculating.
Many were the times when reading this novel I was reminded of poor Parisians drinking themselves into a stupor in Émile Zola's 1877 novel, L'Assommoir (The Drinking Den). My goodness, some things never change. Let me take that back - some things do change: when Zola's novel was first published, critics complained the book was too fierce, too brutal, too sordid. No such complaint from critics with The Engagement - another fifty years removed from European Romanticism and fierce, brutal and sordid are all accepted as the norm.
Georges Simenon had a lifelong dread of crowds, having once witnessed a crowd whipped into a frenzy and then mauling an innocent victim. A crowd transformed into an impassioned mob in the last chapter of The Engagement is foreshadowed when Mr. Hire furtively trails his neighbor Alice and her boyfriend to a soccer match; Mr. Hire sits directly behind Alice and stares at the nape of her bare neck during the entire match (Mr. Hire is also a Peeping Tom; Alice lives in the apartment directly across the narrow courtyard from Mr. Hire and Mr. Hire has been staring into her bedroom night after night).
Anyway, at one point in the match, “The stands resonated like a drum, shuddered, then positively shook as thousands of people rose at once to cheer.” Such mass excitation reminds me of a quote from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
The story is riveting, written in lean, crystal-clear language – from the first to last sentence, not a word is wasted; every turn of phrase, metaphor and image hones character and drives action, for example, Mr. Hire isolated in his apartment: “Sitting at the table, Mr. Hire ate buttered bread and drank coffee, impassively, staring straight ahead. When he had finished, he remained there for a moment, without moving, as if frozen in time and space. He began to hear noises, at first weak and anonymous – creaks, footsteps, collisions – and soon he could feel his entire universe, with this room at its center, dissolving into the furtive sounds.”
This New York Review Books publication also includes an Afterward written by John Gray. Gray does an excellent job highlighting various Simenon themes. At one point Grey notes: “Nearly all of Simenon’s romans durs - the books he termed “hard” novels to distinguish them from the hundreds of popular thrillers he also wrote – deal with people whose lives are disrupted by seemingly random happenings or impulses. Anything – from the catastrophe of war to the most trivial daily incident – can break up the routines that give them a sense of themselves.” Another word for “routine” could be “habit” and Simenon spotlights how much habit plays in everyday life. Unfortunately in our modern urbanized world, fear can count as one such habit. Read all about it in this short existential novel.
And Mr. Hire doesn’t have to metamorphose into a giant Gregor Samsa-like bug; being a loner, an outsider who looks the way he does - short flabby body, round staring eyes, puffy waxen face, curled moustache as if it drawn on with India ink - is all he needs to mark him as a loathsome pervert, almost subhuman, the perfect murder suspect. And since he also served a prison term for trafficking in pornography and currently ekes out a living by his scam mail order business, police and state officials judge Mr. Hire guilty on all counts until (fat chance, haha) proven innocent.
Engagement was published in 1933 when Georges Simenon was thirty-years-old, the same age range as when Albert Camus wrote The Stranger, Franz Kafka wrote Metamorphosis and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Nausea. What is it about existential themes and that time in a sensitive author's life? And Simenon’s Engagement is all about existential themes, mainly fear and alienation. The prominence of fear prompted me to include the above film still from Czeck director Zbyněk Brynych’s 1964 The Fifth Horseman is Fear. The film's title could have been this novel's title.
Georges Simenon is best known for all his many novels featuring Detective Maigret, sometimes referred to as the French Sherlock Holmes. Well, unlike Maigret or Homes, there’s nothing appealing about the detectives in Engagement; quite the contrary, they are portrayed as cartoonish dolts, a gaggle of self-centered brutes who slug down booze or seek out quick sex, seeking not justice but simply closing the case so they can move on. And the police commissioner is hardly any better – the way Simenon sketches Mr. Hire under interrogation (and dehumanization) is both chilling and deeply disturbing.
On the subject of drinking booze, the detectives hardly have the exclusives. At every turn the men and woman in the novel sit down with a bottle or glass morning, noon or night, downing drink after drink. It’s as if liquor goes hand in hand and is the sordid complement with hearts constricted, cold and calculating.
Many were the times when reading this novel I was reminded of poor Parisians drinking themselves into a stupor in Émile Zola's 1877 novel, L'Assommoir (The Drinking Den). My goodness, some things never change. Let me take that back - some things do change: when Zola's novel was first published, critics complained the book was too fierce, too brutal, too sordid. No such complaint from critics with The Engagement - another fifty years removed from European Romanticism and fierce, brutal and sordid are all accepted as the norm.
Georges Simenon had a lifelong dread of crowds, having once witnessed a crowd whipped into a frenzy and then mauling an innocent victim. A crowd transformed into an impassioned mob in the last chapter of The Engagement is foreshadowed when Mr. Hire furtively trails his neighbor Alice and her boyfriend to a soccer match; Mr. Hire sits directly behind Alice and stares at the nape of her bare neck during the entire match (Mr. Hire is also a Peeping Tom; Alice lives in the apartment directly across the narrow courtyard from Mr. Hire and Mr. Hire has been staring into her bedroom night after night).
Anyway, at one point in the match, “The stands resonated like a drum, shuddered, then positively shook as thousands of people rose at once to cheer.” Such mass excitation reminds me of a quote from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “If you're trapped in the dream of the Other, you're fucked.”
The story is riveting, written in lean, crystal-clear language – from the first to last sentence, not a word is wasted; every turn of phrase, metaphor and image hones character and drives action, for example, Mr. Hire isolated in his apartment: “Sitting at the table, Mr. Hire ate buttered bread and drank coffee, impassively, staring straight ahead. When he had finished, he remained there for a moment, without moving, as if frozen in time and space. He began to hear noises, at first weak and anonymous – creaks, footsteps, collisions – and soon he could feel his entire universe, with this room at its center, dissolving into the furtive sounds.”
This New York Review Books publication also includes an Afterward written by John Gray. Gray does an excellent job highlighting various Simenon themes. At one point Grey notes: “Nearly all of Simenon’s romans durs - the books he termed “hard” novels to distinguish them from the hundreds of popular thrillers he also wrote – deal with people whose lives are disrupted by seemingly random happenings or impulses. Anything – from the catastrophe of war to the most trivial daily incident – can break up the routines that give them a sense of themselves.” Another word for “routine” could be “habit” and Simenon spotlights how much habit plays in everyday life. Unfortunately in our modern urbanized world, fear can count as one such habit. Read all about it in this short existential novel.
"A
dirty bit of legal swindling. The old trick of a hundred francs a day
without quitting your job, and a box of paints. You seduce poor people
with your ads, and since after all you do send them something for their
money, you can't be prosecuted. Tell me, Mr. Hire or Hirovitch, what was
that about coming here to give me your word of honor?"
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