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keebleman's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
3.0
This depiction of a mid-life crisis is not top-drawer Simenon. The protagonist’s plight is overly familiar and his obsession with the young girl oddly supererogatory. The book’s main strength is its vivid depiction of Porquerolles, its heat, buildings, pace of life and whores (you just know Simenon is painting from life!).
lisahopevierra's review against another edition
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
Simenon is a fine writer who is adept at portraying existential malaise paired with compulsive, yet repulsive fixations. The neurosis of the protagonist Dr. Mahé propels the book. He is not a well man. While never graphic, the book has an overwhelming darkness with implied violence. My feelings as I read were ones of dizziness and nausea. This is not one of the Inspector Maigret series but one of his “psychological” portraits like The Widower.
chris_tyson's review against another edition
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
nearnik's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
mothlight's review against another edition
3.0
My first Simenon is this quick read, not a murder mystery at all but still suffused with the fatalism of crime fiction. It's about a doctor who develops a consuming preoccupation with an imagined life on the island of Porquerolles after spending a distinctly uncomfortable vacation there; he and his family are a poor match for the climate, the people, and their lifestyle. And yet he decides to return to Porquerolles the following year, to his wife's dismay. Part of the appeal is the doctor's wished-for escape from his bourgeois existence, where he feels suffocated by the expectations of his family and the role forced on him by his ancestry, but his obsession is catalyzed here by death -- summoned to see to a dying woman, he is haunted by a glimpse of her young daughter, wearing a red dress and crouched in a corner of the room with the woman's fresh corpse. That dress becomes the signature image of the book, and the doctor returns to it again and again. This is not Lolita; the doctor has nothing like a relationship with the girl, nor does he even speak directly to her. But Simenon uses her to suggest the deep-seated, irrational impulses at the heart of the doctor's crisis. I confess I didn't find this particular scenario especially compelling, possibly because I've become desensitized to the basic midlife crisis in 20th century literature, but Simenon's writing is nonetheless masterful. The psychology is intriguing, the details of time and place are compelling, and even the supporting characters are vividly sketched, all of which elevates the piece above what could have been a one-note descent into madness.
furfff's review against another edition
3.0
A man is caught in the voluptuous currents of warring possible lives. I love the idea to this one, and the end is stunning, classic Simenon, but i faltered with this one way more than most of his. It feels overlong and while a deeply unlikeable protagonist isn’t a showstopper (nor is it a rarity for this author), an... underexplained... one is. Why he’s so ungrateful and torn was too loosely drawn for my taste.
m_ess's review against another edition
5.0
One of the stronger romans dur. A middle age freak out novel by the definitive autuer of the genre. A book about a sort of devastating, fascinating, impossible to look away from masculine death drive.
Simenon's hard novels have a secret sauce: misogyny. It hits different when you're in the hands of a master. The Mahe Circle is built around that misogyny. The main character's mother looms over the story – it's ultimate villain. No one is this book is more hated or despised than the main character's mother. The main character sees some of her in every other woman in the book, and he despises them too. Sometimes hates them. Wants to possess them. He is intimidated by his mother, but capable of casually sexually harassing any other women in his life. Or of aiming younger men at them like vicarious weapons.
(in one of the books most upsetting passages the main character inadvertently orchestrates a date rape, a fact that he struggles and ultimately fails to wrap his head around – instead repressing his feelings into a simmering, omnidirectional resentment)
He can never quite muster the will to lust after other women. Certainly not his wife. Not even the young girl in the red dress on the island where his family vacations who he cannot get out of his mind. They are, after all, aspects of his mother. To even think of her as a woman with sexual urges and sexual organs upsets him. His hatred of her is pure – childlike.
Yet a sequence depicting her struggle with and eventual death from cancer is the most tender passage in the book. The way the main character cares for her during her illness is rivalled only by the way she cares for everyone around her, and for herself. She comes across as a titan. A truly tremendous woman – capable in the past of standing up to the main character's late, overbearing father and in the present of, nearly until the end, warding off his stiflingly provincial relatives. She is a character whose full life is only hinted at in all its vibrancy, but around whom every other character revolves. The main character's love for her is palpable, here. Her loss devastates him. It is her loss, perhaps as much as or more than anything else – his ennui, his failed attempts to escape a life he feels increasingly oppressed by – that pushes him over the edge from frustration toward his ultimate self-destruction.
He is as aware of this as he is of anything – he rejects it, he embraces a fatal obsession. Briefly, before the end, he drives a car too fast into the night (a reoccurring image in Simeon's novels). When he does, it is as much away from his mother as it is toward his eventual undoing.
Books like this are hard to find anymore. I'm not sure there are many people interested in publishing this sort of uncritical, almost admiring, portrait old-fashioned paternalistic toxic masculinity. And I'm not sure that isn't a good thing. Maybe the world has had enough of that type of thing: too many extant versions of that vision, crafted by old white men, cluttering used bookstore shelves.
This one though, I'm glad it exists. Out of the lot, this one is perfect.
Simenon's hard novels have a secret sauce: misogyny. It hits different when you're in the hands of a master. The Mahe Circle is built around that misogyny. The main character's mother looms over the story – it's ultimate villain. No one is this book is more hated or despised than the main character's mother. The main character sees some of her in every other woman in the book, and he despises them too. Sometimes hates them. Wants to possess them. He is intimidated by his mother, but capable of casually sexually harassing any other women in his life. Or of aiming younger men at them like vicarious weapons.
(in one of the books most upsetting passages the main character inadvertently orchestrates a date rape, a fact that he struggles and ultimately fails to wrap his head around – instead repressing his feelings into a simmering, omnidirectional resentment)
He can never quite muster the will to lust after other women. Certainly not his wife. Not even the young girl in the red dress on the island where his family vacations who he cannot get out of his mind. They are, after all, aspects of his mother. To even think of her as a woman with sexual urges and sexual organs upsets him. His hatred of her is pure – childlike.
Yet a sequence depicting her struggle with and eventual death from cancer is the most tender passage in the book. The way the main character cares for her during her illness is rivalled only by the way she cares for everyone around her, and for herself. She comes across as a titan. A truly tremendous woman – capable in the past of standing up to the main character's late, overbearing father and in the present of, nearly until the end, warding off his stiflingly provincial relatives. She is a character whose full life is only hinted at in all its vibrancy, but around whom every other character revolves. The main character's love for her is palpable, here. Her loss devastates him. It is her loss, perhaps as much as or more than anything else – his ennui, his failed attempts to escape a life he feels increasingly oppressed by – that pushes him over the edge from frustration toward his ultimate self-destruction.
He is as aware of this as he is of anything – he rejects it, he embraces a fatal obsession. Briefly, before the end, he drives a car too fast into the night (a reoccurring image in Simeon's novels). When he does, it is as much away from his mother as it is toward his eventual undoing.
Books like this are hard to find anymore. I'm not sure there are many people interested in publishing this sort of uncritical, almost admiring, portrait old-fashioned paternalistic toxic masculinity. And I'm not sure that isn't a good thing. Maybe the world has had enough of that type of thing: too many extant versions of that vision, crafted by old white men, cluttering used bookstore shelves.
This one though, I'm glad it exists. Out of the lot, this one is perfect.
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