51 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I have been a stranger in a strange land, December 21, 2006
This review is from: The Strangers in the House (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
Exodus ii. 22.
Georges Simenon was nothing if not prolific in both his literary and public life. Born in Belgium in 1903, Simenon turned out hundreds of novels. Simenon's obsession with writing caused him to break off an affair (he was prolific in this area of his life as well) with the celebrated Josephine Baker in Paris when he could only write twelve novels in the twelve month period in which they were involved. Although perhaps best known for his Inspector Maigret detective novels, Simenon also wrote over a hundred novels that he referred to as `romans durs' (literally "hard novels"). "Strangers in the House" is one of Simenon's hard novels and to call it noir is not an understatement.
Hector Loursat, an accomplished attorney, has been a stranger in his own house ever since his wife abandoned him and their newborn child eighteen years ago. Since that time Loursat's universe has shrunk to his bedroom, his library and his dining room. He barely speaks to his now 18 year old daughter or their cook. They are for all intents and purposes, strangers. He is a hermit, alone with his books and a profligate amount of burgundy and brandy. It is only the murderous presence of other strangers in his house that may stir him out of his emotional coma. That dark-setting forms the backdrop for "Strangers in the House".
Loursat is roused from his alcohol-induced sleep by what he thinks may be a gunshot. His suspicions are confirmed when he stumbles through portions of the house he hasn't seen in years and discovers a body. He soon discovers that his daughter has fallen in with something of a gang of youths who like to live on the edge. The rest of the novel finds Loursat grappling with the implications of the murder. We see Loursat struggling out of his hermetic cocoon. The reader is left to wonder, as the story progresses, whether Loursat can break out of his cocoon long enough to connect with his daughter and protect her interests through a criminal investigation and trial.
The result is wholly satisfying. I was totally drawn to the character of Loursat. Simenon does not make him particularly attractive. His word pictures of Loursat's appearance and manner are not designed to elicit great sympathy. Nevertheless, the pain Loursat has suffered (although unstated) is palpable and as the story progressed I could not help but hope that Loursat would find the strength to `set things right' both with the criminal investigation and trial and with his life. The result is surprising but it also felt just about right.
New York Review of Books should be congratulated for bringing Simenon's classic `romans durs' back into print. The paperback quality is excellent and each novel in the series is introduced by a writer of note. In this instance the marvelous P.D. James writes a brief but powerful introduction. I recommend all of Simenon's books and Strangers in the House is no exception. L. Fleisig
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Read it for Simenon's superb character development, rather than the suspense, November 23, 2009
This review is from: The Strangers in the House (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
It is a testament to Simenon's quirky way of crafting a novel that when reading The Strangers in the House, one finds the actual solving of the mystery as the least interesting part of the novel.
Simenon took an interesting approach to his novels to say the least. He would often start out by writing everything he knew about his main characters on the backs of envelopes. Simple things: where do they live, what do they do for a living, who is in their family. Case in point, Hector Loursat, the protagonist of The Strangers in the House. At the beginning of the novel, we learn that Loursat is:
- An abandoned husband (his wife having left him for a lover 18 years ago)
- A father (and not a very good one to his only daughter)
- A slob (who walks about the house in his soiled smoking jacket)
- A drunk (who goes through several bottles of burgundy a day)
- And a recluse (who has not left the confines of his bedroom nee study in many years)
He is more a mole than a human being, burrowed into his hole never to be disturbed. When a gunshot is suddenly heard in his home at the beginning of the story, Loursat does not jump up, running from room to room in a panic. Instead, he sits there for a moment, wondering, pondering. Like a man woken from a deep slumber, Loursat finally gets up to find out exactly what happened. Simenon -- in perfectly crafted prose, not an extra bit of fat or superfluous description -- captures the moment of discovery when Loursat first hears the sound of a gunshot.
At first he thought of the crack of a whip, a common enough sound to hear in the early morning when the garbage-men went on their rounds.
But this noise hadn't come from outside. Nor was it the crack of a whip. There was more weight in it than that, more percussion, so much so that he had felt a slight shock in his chest before his ears actually heard it.
As he looked up, listening, the expression on his face was one of slight annoyance at the intrusion. It might have been taken for anxiety, but it wasn't that.
What was so impressive was the silence that followed. A silence more compact, more positive than any ordinary one, but which yet seemed full of strained vibrations.
He didn't get up from his chair at once. He filled his glass, emptied it, put his cigarette back in his mouth, then heaved himself up and went over to the door, where he listened for a second before opening it.
That description of the silence is so taut and perfect that it carries you out of the room, taking you all the way upstairs to the mysterious location of the gun shot. You are no longer standing with Loursat. Instead you are in the room, hearing the echo of the gun, standing with all parties involved, caught up in that tense moment of aftershock, when everyone is still can't believe what has just happened. Then Simenon takes you back downstairs, back to Loursat, to share his disbelief in the sound he just heard.
Loursat does make his way upstairs to discover that a strange man has been murdered in his home and his own daughter may be caught up in the affair. This moment is where Loursat begins to wake up. In the ensuing chapters, as Loursat tries to piece together the events of that fateful evening, we care less about who or who didn't commit the crime and instead are more concerned with the protagonist's return to life. Loursat dragged further into the case, ventures outside -- horror of horrors -- then starts talking to people, then begins to become a social being, even beginning to have his wine in a local bar. Along the way, he discovers that he didn't know his daughter as well as he had thought. And he comes to see the effect of his soiled reclusiveness on the Loursat household.
Like Kees Popinga in The Man Who Watched Trains Go By (one of Simenon's best suspense novels), we see the story through the eyes of the central character. We live in Loursat's head, at first as crowded and stuffy as his overheated lair. But as Loursat delves further in he investigation, that space is aired out (both the study and the brain) and the reader becomes increasingly caught up in his return to humanity. In some ways, the ensuing investigation and trial is very pedestrian, almost clichéd. The whodunit aspects of the novel are almost superfluous. Simenon's superb ability to bring us into Loursat's experience (as he did with Kees Popinga), drags the reader into the novel, and in the end, it is the trial of Loursat, the testing of his will, that makes the novel so interesting.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For the defence, March 9, 2009
This review is from: The Strangers in the House (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
The New York Review of Books is reissuing the "romans durs" of Georges Simenon -- his non-Maigret novels where the emphasis is more on psychology than on detection. Of the three that I have read so far -- including the magnificent
TROPIC MOON -- this is the most like his detective novels. There is a crime, a mystery, and a court case, and the book ends when the true culprit is discovered. Or almost ends -- for the main focus is not on the solution of the crime, but the effect that his involvement in the case has on the defence attorney, Hector Loursat.
Maître Loursat is not an attractive figure when we first meet him. A middle-aged bear of a man, he had been abandoned by his wife many years before. Now, drinking several bottles of Burgundy a day, he lives in two rooms of a big rambling house, accompanied only by a surly cook, a shifting procession of housemaids, and his almost-adult daughter Nicole, whom he sees only at silent mealtimes. He is quite unaware that a group of Nicole's friends have been occupying the house at night -- until he is disturbed by a gunshot and finds a dying stranger in one of the beds. The events that follow shake him out of his self-pity, and he eventually finds himself defending Nicole's lover in court. Loursat will be changed by the experience -- perhaps not much, but still significantly -- and this change is the real subject of the novel.
Simenon is superb as ever in describing the small provincial town. For instance: "Hardly a window that was not shuttered. The steps of the rare passerby in the dismal streets sounded furtive, almost embarrassed." Behind those shuttered windows, dinner parties are being held by the few privileged bourgeois families, all known to one another and often connected by marriage. Nicole's friends include some of the sons of these families, escaping boredom, and some lowlier individuals just seeking to be included. The class background, like the French legal system, may seem strange to American eyes, but it is an explosive mixture, leading to jealousy and ultimately to murder. And to the rebirth of Hector Loursat.
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