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

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What can be said of a man who claimed to have slept with 10,000 women? who kept his wife, son and two mistresses under one roof? who hated his mother and slapped around his second wife?

Simenon lived and breathed to write, and he wrote with astonishing rapidity, producing 76 Maigret titles, 117 novels and many volumes of memoirs. Where were all the plots, characters, locales and insights to come from, if not from his life?

Patrick Marnham's biography is a fascinating read, and makes us feel that perhaps Simenon had to be as wicked as he was to be the tremendous writer that he was. Marnham does a sensitive job of tracing the influences of two world wars, two occupations and two post-war purges on Simenon, the man and the writer.

I especially enjoyed reading about Simenon's work methods - how, for example, he'd write his psychological novels in a kind of trance. How Maigret was born in a fog of schnapps. And how Simenon limited his literary vocabulary to 2,000 words, so as not to break his concentration by consulting the dictionary.

This is a well-researched, well-thought-out biography, with only a handful of missing pieces. (Would have been nice to have more fly-on-the-wall detail about Simenon's sexual encounters, which were at the center of his life, about whether he ever had STDs, whether he used drugs during his writing marathons, etc.) However, by the end, Marnham's pretentious insistence on using untranslated French -- particularly when he wants to make an important or subtle point -- is likely to irritate and exhaust readers who don't read French.

What did Simenon's mother think of him at the end of her life? Apparently "that 'Georges aimait toujours les petites gens' and that he was 'tres fier ... mais, voyez-vous, monsieur, c'etait une fierte tres mal placee.'" Clears that right up. What did Simenon think of de Gaulle? That he was a "cocorico." What did the only living witness to Simenon fleeing the French freedom fighters at the end of WW2 have to say? When "asked if the FFI were 'mauvais garcons,' she replied 'Ils n'etaient pas toujours tre intelligents.'" Why does Marnham refer to three different people as "clochards"? There's not a word for that in English? And so on.

Marnham seems quite proud to have written the first major biography of Simenon in English. Simenon, who prized clarity and simplicity in his writing, and was read by more people in other languages than in French, would have punched him in the nose. Which is too bad. Aside from parts that will make literally no sense to the many fans of Simenon who don't read French, this is a great book.

Great Book Have Read most Of Georges Simenon's Books Wanted To Read about The Author Very Pleased With Book & Seller