Word: simenon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...other story, The Hitchhiker, is a "hard" novel, serious all the way. From it the U.S. reader can tell pretty definitely, and at one sitting, whether or not he wants to add the word simenon to his vocabulary. The scene is New York and New England, and Hero Steve Hogan has the same basic trouble as most Simenon heroes: life and the world have beaten him down into a confused, resentful wretch in whom something has to give. He has a pretty wife who works and of whom he is a little jealous, two kids away at camp in Maine...
DESTINATIONS (320 pp.) - Georges Simenon-Doubleday...
What is a simenon? Most literate Europeans can give the answer, but a lot of U.S. readers would hate to have it thrown at them as the $64,000 question. A simenon is a novel written by Belgian-born Georges Simenon. No one knows how many simenons there are, least of all Author Simenon himself, but the total cannot be far from 400, and the man who is responsible for them all cannot even remember how he ended his first book, written...
...Simenon is best known as the creator of pipe-smoking Inspector Maigret, the kindly, plodding and vaguely troubled French detective. But the keenest Simenon fans have long since stopped thinking of him as a mere mystery writer or even as a literary psychologist. To them he is a real novelist with a special view of life that is instantly conjured up in their minds by the simple mention of his name...
...this sounds like the stuff of any one of a hundred novels at the local lending library. But Simenon does not see Steve just as a man in a grey flannel suit. Rather, he is the unwilling wearer of a hair shirt imposed on him by a world he never made and is too weak to remake. Soon enough Steve gets a little outside ordinary life. On an auto trip to Maine with Nancy to pick up their children at camp, he gets drunk and Nancy leaves him to go on by bus. When Steve picks up a hunted criminal...