The Widow Courdec By Georges Simenon

The Widow Courdec by Georges Simenon

Belgian fiction

Original title -La Veuve Couderc

Translator – Siãn Reynolds

Source – Review copy

I had planned to review this last month, but with reviewing strangers in the house for the Club year. So  I held this back. This was written in the mid-war years by Simenon, taken on an existentialist novel it happened to have come out the same year as Camus’s novel The Outsider, which has always overshadowed this work from Simenon. Something that annoyed Simenon as he felt his book was just as good. We have a new translation here as part of the Penguins project to bring everything they can by Simenon into English, a job they have been doing nearly as long as this blog has been going he wrote so much, over 400 books, some in his own name others with a varioety of pen names he used over his life. This is the 14th book I have reviewed in the blog from Simenon, and I will carry on as long as I keep getting either sent or see them around.

He was walking. For at least three kilometres, he was alone on the road across which tree trunks cast oblique shadows every ten metres, and he strode on, without hur-rying, from one dark strip of shade to the next. Since it was near midday and the sun was reaching its height, a grotesquely foreshortened shadow, his own, slipped along ahead of him.

The road led straight up to the summit of the hill, where it seemed to vanish from view. On the left, things rustled in the woods. On the right, in the gently rolling fields there was just one horse, far in the distance, a white horse, pulling a wine-vat mounted on wheels; in the same field stood a scarecrow, or it might have been a man.

The opening as we see Jean appear and what efrfect he will have on this whole story!

This starts with two souls that meet on a bust. They seem similar initially, but as the book goes on we see they are not. Jean is a middle-class man who has had a hard time, and he was just released from Prison when he meets Tati, the Widow Courdec of the book title. She is a woman that married the son of a rich family whilst she was a servant in that house and had been there since she was 14 and grown closer to the older brother. So you can get her place in this FGamily home with the sisters of her Husband when she has left the Estate as he was the only son in the Family. Tati loves the control this gives her, and she even uses it on Jean at times ! She sees Jean as perfect to be here, Valet. As the two grow closer. But as events change when Tati is attacked and bedridden by one of her husband’s sisters, Jean has to look after her in bed. As this is happening, it means there is a shift in the dynamics which means that Jean is spending a lot more time with the sister than he had before, so he is drawn to the youngster in the family, Felice, but does  Tati Know what knock-on effect will this have to them all?

First in the queue was the woman wearing mourning, dignified and disdainful, next the woman from the grocer’s shop, her neck swathed in a flannel bandage. That morning she had lost her voice.Then it was Felicie’s turn. There were other women as well, coming out of houses from every direction and approaching the butcher’s van. They took their time.Many of them had a gait like geese, swinging heavy stomachs ahead of them and eating as they walked.

The back of the van lifted up to reveal a kind of shop: whole quarter-carcasses were suspended inside; there was a set of scales with its copper weights, squares of brown paper hanging on a string.

Who’s next?

Felice is seen more by Jean later on but what effect will that have ?

This has themes of money and family power. People of the different class clash. Jean is a catalyst for these events. His introduction to the house is like The stranger appearing in Camus. The sheer fact he is there and the dynamics of the situation have changed will lead to an ending of some sort, but as the book unfolds, things seem to go one way and then another as other events happen. He wrote this a couple of years after strangers in the house, and you can see how he has grown as a writer. This has a complexity that some,e of his other books haven’t, but this is a dark book with a lousy relationship, a terrible family, and a man just out of prison. That is all you need for a book that is dark and uncomfortable at times. It questions who they are and what they desire as, over time, you see this change in all those within the house. This book is in a Different Translation from the US publisher NYRB Classics and is called The Widow by them. Have you read either translation ?

Winstons score -B solid piece of writing from Simenon lots of ideas here but maybe a little dark as well.