Category: 1940club

The Strangers in the House by Georges Simenon

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The Strangers in the House by Goerges Simenon

Belgian fiction

Original title – Les inconnus dans la maison

Translator – Howard Curtis

Source – Personal copy

I am late again for my last book for the 1940 club. I’d love a fortnight for it myself. I am like a kid in a sweet shop when I read the list of books for every year when it comes out I have reviewed 3 books, but I had actually brought six for this week ready. But I think the others are books I will get to at some point. There is a given for most years we get to read from for the club and that there is more than likely a book from Georges Simenon as he was such a prolific writer in his lifetime and that was the case for this year it was one of his roman Durs books his darker stand-alone works he wrote and this had a new translation from the ever-growing Penguin series that aims to put all his books out in English. Here we have a book that uses a classic bit of crime novel writing, and that is the found body no one knows at the start.

He could have sworn that the sound didn’t come from the bed, which must be to the left – at least it had been there the last time Loursat had gone into his daughter’s room by chance, perhaps two years earlier.

“Open up!’ he said simply.

Just a minute..

The minute was a very long one. Behind the door, someone moved, trying hard to make his or her movements as silent as possible.

When he hears the shot sand wonders what it was only to fiund out the truth!!

The book finds a reclusive drinker, a man who, after his wife who left him nearly twenty years earlier. He has withdrawn from the world. This all changes when his daughter and her friends living on the edge bring a man they had hit with a car home, and it is that man who is shot dead by the shot that wakes the reclusive Hector Loursat. He used to have a law practice before the divorce and his decline into the bottle, so when he reappears to all those in the small town, many of which he knew before those years away. After many years it is with a sense of strangeness from those in the village, and when Hector wants to find out what really happened on that night with his daughter and her friends, did his daughter’s boyfriend kill this man in cold blood? Who is the man? A father shares a house with his daughter but they are two bodies swimming in different worlds in the same space but in separate worlds. Only after the events does Hector tries to find out about the gang she runs with and her life and save her man! Will he find out who fired the shot that morning that brought him?

Poor Chief Inspector Binet! He hadn’t expected such a greeting. He stood up, then sat down again, apologizing.

It was Josephine who had admitted him to the study while it was still light. She had left him to his fate, and he had stayed seated with his hat on his knees, first in the half-light, then in complete darkness.

I thought I ought perhaps to bring you up to date on . . . I mean, it did happen in your house, didn’t it?

The police are a bit hopeless in the book and jump to a conclusion about the events of that night

This has two classic crime novels things the first is the body appearing in a room dead from Body in the Library by Christie to Silver Blaze by Conan Doyle. The found body and the events thereafter have started a great crime novel. Then we have a group of suspects in His daughter Nicoles, her boyfriend, the chief suspect in the law’s eyes and the gang they run with. This book has a plot but is more driven by the characters in the book and their stories as much as what is happening in the book. It sees a man coming back into the world after so many years. It sees a father uncover his daughter’s actual life. It sees them both facing ghosts from their past and the events many years ago that lead Hector to become a recluse. I had probably read this at some point. My aim is to read as many of his books as I can over the next few years, and the Roman Durs these are the books I have not read as many of, but in this one, he has managed to mix a few classic crime novel traits alongside a  character study. Have you read this book or have you a favourite from his Roman Durs ?

Winstons score – B A solid Simenon not my favourite by him but not the worst I have read.

 

Conversations in Bolzano by Sàndor Màrai

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Conversations in Bolzano

Hungarian fiction

Original title – Vendégjáték Bolzanóban

Translator – George Szirtes

Source – Personal copy

When I look at the list of books from 1940, I always love to pick a translated book that came out that year. There were a few I had hoped to bring two this week, but this is the oner I will fit in and the other I will be bringing out a review on Monday. This appealed as I had read two other books by the Hungarian writer Sàndor Màrai over the years and have reviewed The Rebels here a few years ago. A writer in his day was considered one of the leading writers in Hungary described by Le Monde as Hungarian Sándor Márai was the insightful chronicler of a collapsing world well this is a book set outside his insightful books into the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire but it follows a man welll Casanova but actually in the book it is often missed it is him using his forename and maybe describing him as more of a myth than a man. Lost Love is in the book love lust friends and also a man that is larger than life.

‘Five,” he grumbled, and bit hard on his lower lip, wagging his head. Screwing up his eyes, he gazed into the fame, then into the deep shadows of the room, then finally into the far distance, into the past, into life itself.

And suddenly he gave a low whistle, as if he had found something he had been looking for. He pronounced the name,

“Francesca.

He thinks back on her when he her mention of the Dukes name.

I was drawn to this a Cassanova is one of those figures in History that is part man, part Myth the real and the false blend. SPO a story following his prison break from Venice and his heading to Bolzano a small village where the Duke had fought a moonlight duel for a woman much younger than both the men and lost the Fair Francesca, barely legal at just 16. They five years earlier when he had fought the duel with the 60-year old duke for this woman’s hand. He has now escaped on the run and has managed to borrow money along the way he turns up dishevelled at the hotel in the town and demands the finest suite in the Hotel. this reminds me of a scene in Withnail and I where Withnail and Cassanova are similar characters. He had scars and had been told if he returned, he be dead so why has he returned what has driven him to come back? What will the Duke do? What will Franseca make of Casanova and his drive to want her as he rhymes lyrically about his feeling for her.

He touched the scars with his fingertips, itemizing and remembering them. There was a line of three scars on his left, all three just above the heart, as if his enemies had unconsciously yet somehow deliberately, instinctively, aimed precisely at his heart. The central scar, the deepest and roughest of them, was the one he owed to His Excellency of Parma and to Francesca. He put his index finger to the now painless wound. The duel had been fought with rapiers. The Duke’s blade had made a treacherous incursion above his heart, so the surgeon had had to spend weeks draining the blood and the suppuration off the deep wound; and there had also been some internal bleeding, as a result of which the victim, after fever fits, bouts of semiconscious delirium, and stretches of screaming and groaning insensibility, finally bade farewell to adventure.

The scars of the first meeting and duel that nearly killed Cassaanova

I love Màrai writing he captures the simmering love of Cassanova so well, and also a love triangle at its most dangerous duel death threats and promise to leave all add to the book. He also shows maybe the true poetic nature of the man that was Cassanova a normal man that had that thing that, as we say made woman weak at the knee a certain air and way with words that drew people in. This is a slower-paced book than I usually like, but it had some great interplay and managed to bring to life a figure I wanted to know more about in Cassanova I suppose looking back at the events now it seems very outdated a 20-year-old woman being argued over by two men both a lot older than her. It is a sign of how times have moved. But also, there is many a Cassannova around still those men that women just can’t help but Love well in Withnail’s case, there is always a sense of the character being larger than life and maybe hiding his own sexual feelings. But there is no doubt about Cassanova feeling for the younger Francesca a muse to this man. Have you read any books by Màrai? He wrote more than 50, but we only seem to have less than ten of his books so far in English.

Winstyons score – +b A yarn may be outdated in its content but still fun.

 

The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene

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The Power and The Glory by Graham Greene

English fiction

Source – Personal copy

I love when Simon’s and Karen’s six monthly year club as it gives me a chance to read the books that came out that year I hadn’t read and ion this case go back to a book I had read many years ago. I was always a fan of Greene I think I was 11 or 12 when I first came across him, and I think it may have been through a radio version of Our Man in Havana a different book to this one, but that was my intro to his works, and through my early twenties I read a lot of his books. I am not a huge fan of rereading books for me the process of reading the time, and the memories of that reading are like a fly caught in amber that one moment remembered, and one always worries if a book will be as entertaining or grabbing as I remembered this book was.

The lieutenant walked in front of his men with an air of bitter distaste. He might have been chained to them unwill. ingly – perhaps the scar on his jaw was the relic of an escape.

His gaiters were polished, and his pistol-holster: his buttons were all sewn on. He had a sharp crooked nose jutting out of a lean dancer’s face; his neatness gave an effect of inordinate ambition in the shabby city. A sour smell came up to the plaza from the river and the vultures were bedded on the roofs, under the tent of their rough black wings. Sometimes, a little moron head peered out and down and a claw shifted. At nine-thirty exactly all the lights in the plaza went out.

The lieutent a man of polish and belief in his quest

The book came about after Greene had visited Mexico and saw the persecution of the Catholic church at the time was for a non-fiction piece, but he later wrote this novel about a priest on the run. Always unnamed, we follow his journey and see a man with many faults, not the perfect priest. There is a joke about the type of men that go into the priesthood in Ireland, and one of the men that are said to join the priesthood is the drinker. Well, this is a perfect example of a whiskey priest a man that has had a child, and Brigitta his daughter is a strange child that he is drawn to help and loves her. Even thou as she has a look around her. But he is on the run as he is being chased by the Lieutenant a man who has vowed to rid Mexico of the Catholic church. It is the story of two men with beliefs, two sides of the same coin in a way driven to uphold what they believe in but also at polar ends of the spectrum. But who will win will the priest be drawn back because of God?

She said savagely, ‘I know about things. I went to school.

I’m not like these others – ignorant. I know you’re a bad priest. That time we were together – that wasn’t all you’ve done.

I’ve heard things, I can tell you. Do you think God wants you to stay and die – a whisky priest like you?’ He stood patiently in front of her, as he had stood in front of the lieutenant, listening.

He hadn’t known she was capable of all this thought. She said,

“Suppose you die. You’ll be a martyr, won’t you? What kind of a martyr do you think you’ll be? It’s enough to make people mock.?

Then the other side the priest here is him described

Greene is, of course, known for being a catholic novelist, but for me, this has both that and also a sprinkling of what he used to call his entertainment to it. The title is a nod towards the lord’s prayer. This is also where he admitted later in life he found his faith through those pheasants he had seen and the priest that worked underground and was the bases for the priest in this book. It has a pace to it, and I always feel Greene is the master of tension in his writing. He knows how to pitch it just right and he does that so well here as we get drawn to the end and discover what happens to the two main characters in the book. Two men that, as much as they are different, are the same and driven, by belief. As Lucretius said, Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion, and in both men, you can see this. Have you read this by Greene, or do you have a favourite book by Greene?

Winston’s score A – The book has stood the test of time and I loved it the more the second time around.

do you like rereading ?