The Krull House by Georges Simenon review – a dark masterpiece

First published in 1939, this eerily prophetic study of race hatred and mass hysteria in a small French town is vintage Simenon

We all think we know Georges Simenon, even those of us who haven’t read his books. However, the more of those books we do read, the stranger a writer he becomes. There is Maigret, of course, like a kind-hearted but slightly grumpy uncle, with his pipe and his hat – originally a bowler – his mid-morning petit blanc and his evening marc, and his inexhaustible fund of sympathy for wrongdoers, who he knows are probably people to whom worse wrong was done in the first place. But even Maigret has his uncanny side, which no doubt Madame Maigret could explain to us, if she cared to. The feeling that pervades Simenon’s work is Freud’s unheimlich, simply the commonplace made strange by being brought to our attention in unfamiliar form. Simenon’s world is extraordinary through being uncannily ordinary.

And then there are the romans durs, as Simenon called them, the “hard novels”, Maigret-less, bleak, unheimlich meditations on the folly and essential pettiness of human beings, whose strongest driving force, in Simenon’s estimation, is boredom, and the fear of being bored. Novels such as Dirty Snow, Monsieur Monde Vanishes and Strangers in the House are among the finest fictions of the 20th century.

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from Books | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2RhOqDa