When Belgian novelist Georges Simenon (1903-1989) neared his 70th birthday, he unplugged his typewriter and abruptly stopped writing. But one thing is certain: nobody could ever accuse Simenon of being a slacker, for after all, he authored over 200 novels under his own name (including dozens of crime novels featuring a detective, one Inspector Jules Maigret) and 300 novels under various noms de plume. So, in terms of sheer numbers, this novel, the subject of my review, is simply one of many. However, if “Monsieur Monde Vanishes” was Simenon’s one and only work of fiction, I wonder if the author would be considered a key existentialist and this book a classic study of identity and alienation. On the topic of identity and alienation, one prime text is Erich Fromm’s “The Sane Society” and it is this classic of social psychology I will quote below and pair with my commentary as a way of highlighting the wisdom nectar contained in Georges Simenon’s fine novel. “By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts—but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship.” ---------- Monsieur Monde turns 48 but will his wife, his son, his daughter, his business associates remember and wish him a happy birthday? Is Monsieur the center of his own world? Is he really alive? Monsieur recognizes the answer to all of the above is ‘no’; at the same time he also realizes it is time to make a quick exit from his comfortable, predictable, deadening upper-upper-middle class life and hit the road. And that is exactly what Monsieur does. “Man cannot live statically because his inner contradictions drive him to seek for an equilibrium.” ---------- Monsieur Monde has been living in his role as a husband, father, business leader. But enough is enough – life is much more, much richer, much freer beyond the stifling boundaries of role. He takes the dramatic first step in shedding his role. We read, “Near Boulevard Sebastopol he noticed a third-rate barbershop and went in, took his place in line behind other customers, and, when his turn came to sit in the hinged chair, told the barber to shave off his mustache.” Shave off his mustache! It doesn’t get more dramatic than that for such a solid, stolid, sedentary member of the bourgeoisie. “Thus, the ultimate choice for man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.” ---------- After the shaving of his mustache, Monsieur begins to feel the ecstasy of release, the bliss of transformation. The author writes about Monsieur’s transformation with such subtlety and tenderness, a true master of the craft of developing character. The subsequent events in the novel are made all the richer by the reality of the ‘new’ Monsieur Monde. “As with the need for relatedness, rootedness, and transcendence, this need for a sense of identity is so vital and imperative that man could not remain sane if he did not find some way of satisfying it.” ---------- After setting out with his new Self, Monsieur senses the risk and dangers involved in shedding habitual categories, as in when the author writes, “He did not know where he was going or what he would do. He had set off. Nothing lay behind him any more: nothing lay before him. He was in space.” “All passions and strivings of man are attempts to find an answer to his existence or, as we may also say, they are an attempt to avoid insanity.” ---------- “He was lucid, not with an everyday lucidity, the sort one finds acceptable, but on the contrary the sort of which one subsequently feels ashamed, perhaps because it confers on supposedly commonplace things the grandeur ascribed to them by poetry and religion.” Monsieur Monde is better able to sense the answer to the riddles: “Does a dog have the Buddha nature?” “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” “The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues. The fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.” --------- Is it time for serious transformation in your life? Need some inspiration? Go ahead – pick up this petite jewel published by New York Review Books (NYRB) featuring an introductory essay by Larry McMurtry and cover photo from Jacques Tati’s Playtime. I myself enjoyed this Simenon novel so much I picked up 2 others of his published by NYRB: Three Bedrooms in Manhattan and Red Lights.
Georges Simenon's name has become synonymous with the cinema for me. I particularly loved Marcel Carne's adaptation of Port of Shadows (the book may go by a different title). This edition of Monsieur Monde Vanishes itself has a still from Jacques Tati's Playtime, which is also a personal favorite. That in mind, I couldn't resist checking out Simenon. I only mention all of this because, in all honesty I've never read any fiction that could even be loosely categorized as a mystery novel, which this one really isn't anyway. I guess I'm just trying to thank the cinema, once again, for directing me toward some good fiction. Monsieur Monde Vanishes is perfect material for a film adaptation. It has it all; trains, a hotel with a rich tapestry of depraved lodgers, a curious protagonist, and an inspiring story about the delusion of geographical escape. The last detail reminds me of Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise in that sense. It's about a character who suddenly decides to leave all of his current life behind in pursuit of another one completely distinguishable from the old one. While Jarmusch's lackadaisical slackers seem slightly less convinced that their little vacation to Florida is really going to change their lives, they are at least under the impression that their lives will seem more interesting in an exotic setting (Florida?). Anyway, both stories present the reader with the moral of how leaving town doesn't always entail leaving behind the self. Monde's character learns a bit toward the end of the story, and even changes a little, but the past that constituted most of his life simply did not want to let him leave. The plot here is so simple that any more information would sort of spoil the story. I can say that Simenon writes such sharp, observational prose, to a degree where the story moves along so effortlessly that one has the impression that they are in the hands of a gifted storyteller. It's no wonder that so many of his novels have made it to the screen (over one-hundred from what I hear).
What do You think about Monsieur Monde Vanishes (2004)?
My first Simenon, and what a disappointment. It feels less like a novel of existential discourse, but more an exercise in existential padding. After a wonderful opening where the main character, M. Monde (a wealthy, ritualized man of mild tastes) breaks his everyday mode, goes to the barber and shaves off his mustache before embarking on an aimless journey to the south of France. He meets people along the way, but nothing Simenon does paints these figures as interesting - despite the odd observation that paints a memorable, standalone image. I don't mind languid, but this novel lingers uninspired on the boring side.I'm not going to give up on Simenon, but this short novel could have worked as a ten page short, or possibly, as a bigger more absorbing novel. As it moves into Monde's new identity, there's nothing to it, and while some descriptions are wonderfully sublime (one comparing his desire to sleep as a cork rising up through dark waters to float on top of a conscious state is especially remarkable), there are sloppy transitions of present to past, choppy descriptions of the world around him, and flaccid characters spewing some flaccid dialogue, especially at the end when Monde encounters a woman of his past. Grit-less, tepid.
—Graham P
Maybe not my favorite of Simenon's romans dur but still satisfying. In this short novel, Monsieur Monde simply walks away from his plump middle class life, finding relief in shabby hotels with shabby people. "There was a percolator in a dingy, crowded closet that served as pantry, but the clerk lit a tiny gas ring, with that calm, rather mournful air common to those who live by night, always alone, while others are asleep." Monseiur Monde realizes "This squalid drabness was all part of what he had been seeking."How to explain the appeal of such bleak fiction? For me too it's a kind of relief, a way of living somewhere else where you've shrugged off the burden of trying to matter.(Again, kudos to the editors at NYRB Classics who are republishing these books that would otherwise disappear – and in a handsome paper editions. Here the cover is a still from Jacques Tati's "Playtime" – perfect!)
—Jim Coughenour
There are certain authors one returns to like old friends. In their novels one finds the landscape and terrain that feel like home. Graham Greene is one such author for me, as are Henning Mankell and Daphne Du Maurier. Georges Simenon with his romans durs feels like another of my most trusted friends and companions.I read Monsieur Monde Vanishes after having started it a year or so ago and putting it aside--not in the right mood at the time--and felt immediately at home, deliciously so. The novel is compelling, as always, and also quietly unsettling.In contemporary fiction often it is the wife who sheds her family and former life. We spend the novel searching for her with her husband, or we spend it with her left-behind family as they try their best to move on without her. In Simenon's novels of the 1950's it is the well-respected businessman and husband, father and bourgeois citizen, who makes a break with his comfortable life to dig deeper in the underworld. Often a crime is what plunges him into that world and makes the break for him. Here there is no crime: M. Monde withdraws a sum of money, buys a second hand suit to change into and takes the train for parts south. He is inexorably drawn to the sea (we glimpse it at various times in the novel) but it is more of distant lure than an acknowledged desire. He takes up with a woman who's been abandoned by her lover on the train. The two, more partners and friends than lovers (though they have sex, they do not succumb to obsessive desire and jealousy that lovers often do), restart daily life & routine in Marseilles among the dance halls, gambling parlors, seedy hotels. M. Monde finds a place for himself in this world (with a new name) until someone from his past surfaces and he feels compelled to act.M. Monde is not passive; he seems sure about what he wants and what he must do, but neither is he driven by the torment and obsession we see in other Simenon novels. His is a quieter desperation and his solution, his newfound milieu, is interesting and unexpected. The ending comes as a surprise (to me, at least) and is cause for the unsettling nature of the novel. M. Monde is not afraid to confront himself and his ghosts. His is a quiet bravery. One feels great affection and sympathy for him, making this one of my very favorite Simenon novels.
—Jessica
