The Man Who Wasn't Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon - Hardcover

Reviews

When the prolific Georges Simenon died at age 86 in 1989, he had written hundreds of novels and several memoirs. Among the author's favorites were his books about shrewd and compassionate Inspector Maigret, conceived by Simenon in 1931 after he left Belgium to live in Paris. As Marnham ( Trail of Havoc: In the Steps of Lord Lucan ) shows, the hero of Simenon's superb French policiers is quite different from his creator. The author's life was turbulent: he was sexually obsessed; he abandoned his wife and son to marry a woman who was as promiscuous as he was; he coupled with his maids. Simenon himself revealed much of this in his last book, Intimate Memoirs, addressed to his only daughter, Marie-Jo, after she committed suicide at age 23 in 1978. Marnham's scrupulous study of this memoir and of Simenon's Belgian family background lay bare Simenon's fantomes. This is a story of an enigma, a man more extraordinary than any character in his perennial bestsellers, and certainly nothing like the admirable Maigret. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Many writers--as Marnham (Trail of Havoc, 1988) points out--head off biographers by destroying their papers. But Simenon (1903-89) left behind so many sources--a massive autobiography, 21 volumes of memoirs, and several earlier autobiographical sketches and novels-- that Marnham defines his job, with undue modesty, largely as referee to the phenomenally productive author's many versions of his life. The facts of Simenon's life are as florid as any biographer could wish. Self-taught reporter and columnist at age 15; intimate of Josephine Baker and Maurice Vlaminck; bestselling (500 million copies) author of over 200 novels (76 featuring Inspector Maigret) and 188 additional potboilers (written with a working vocabulary of 2,000 words); self-confessed lover of 10,000 women; recipient of tributes from fellow authors as diverse as Thornton Wilder, Henry Miller, and Andr‚ Gide--the public events of Simenon's life are fabulous. But Marnham is at his best not in detailing Simenon's successes but in illuminating the relation between his gray, guilt-ridden fiction and his tormented family life--whether the family is that of his adored father and despised mother; his complaisant first wife, R‚gine, and his long-time mistress, Boule; or his calculating second wife, Denyse, and the string of domestic helpers who doubled as paramours. Though Marnham gets bogged down in overprecise parallels between Simenon's family problems and particular novels, his easy command of his subject's life and work allows him not only to select among competing versions of the truth but to generalize with authority about Simenon's inveterate habit of fictionalizing his own life, so that ``his account of the experience became part of the experience''--especially the experience of categorical rejection (both of and by Simenon), which Marnham sees as decisive for an understanding of the man and his work. A biographical study that goes a long way toward illuminating the mystery of Simenon's life in fiction while fostering a healthy respect for that irreducible mystery--the process by which Simenon kept obsessively reinventing himself. (Photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Belgian Simenon (1903-89) was a prolific writer, having completed 193 novels under his own name (the most famous being those of the detective Maigret series), over 200 under 18 pseudonyms; two autobiographical novels and four autobiographies. After his retirement, he dictated 21 volumes of memoirs. Internationally known because of translations and film adaptations of his work, Simenon was quite an eccentric. As Marnham notes, Simenon's autobiographical writings were "a complex web of fact and fantasy which he ended by partly believing himself." Marnham's patient unraveling of the facts behind Simenon's unusual and incredibly busy life is a pleasure to read. Additional, helpful features of the book are its bibliography and index. Recommended for general readers and specialists in the field.
- Danielle Mihram, Univ. of Southern Cal.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.