If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret | Hacker News Reader

If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret

spectator.co.uk

48 pointslermontov30 comments

I love these books. I can buy them in Portugal for 50p and piece and they phenomenal covers. French police stories are fantastic because everything revolves around sex; which speaks to me as more realistic than American det novels (often about conspiracy theories, threats from other countries or from powerful men - to be fair some of them are quite frank about sex too) and British novels (which don’t seem to mention sex at all or when they do, it’s almost in passing and with no relevance to the story).

I find that the French frankness about sex leads to better crime novels that speak more about reality to me. I get the impression that the kind of crime novels each country has really speaks to their character (or intended character - I think the British are as horny as any other people, but they are bad at talking and thinking about sex).

> I can buy them in Portugal for 50p

Can I ask you where? Also, in French of Portuguese? Moving to Portugal in 2020 and would love to know where to find books for cheap!

You can find French books in some places, but you can find cheap Portuguese books virtually anywhere, but particularly so in Porto, close to where I live.

We call local/old/second hand bookshops “alfarrabistas” and they are very common around the country. Some have closed with the savage turistification that’s hit the country, but most are still around for now.

Do you have any favorite you feel like suggesting? I've been there several times but never noticed them and even my Portuguese partner wouldn't know where to find one after many years living abroad.

Where? In Porto or Lisbon?

Both are fine :)

If you are moving there please make an effort to support the local economy and get involved with local politics and governance. The country is being flooded by techies and rich artists thinking that Lisbon is the new Berlin while ignoring completely that they are considerably damaging the local population’s quality of life.

Maigret is much better in French. For such kind of "cheap" unpretentious books, the author is pretty astute and solid building the narrative. There is a lot of "European soul" and specially "French soul" distilled in the books.

I lived in France for a few years and wanted to become fluent in the language. One part of my strategy was just to try to brute-force through some novels with the aid of a dictionary and a conjugation chart. I started with _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ but found the diction too difficult to slog through. I made it through _Le Petit Prince_, but I really clicked with Simenon's detective novels. Since it was a familiar, modern form, it was easier for my brain to fill in the blanks through context. The dialogue, especially, was realistic and quite to the point ("Ici c'est moi qui pose les questions" sticks in my mind).

I did something similar as part of learning English. For me the best author for this purpose was Stephen King (not that I spent much time searching, just random trial and error; I don't even like horror stories). After mastering Stephen King I moved on to J. R. R. Tolkien. For the first fifty pages or so of The Lord of The Rings I had to look up words pretty much one for every other line of text.

It was amazing to see how different authors, although both very good and well-known, use language so very differently, and use quite different sets of words and of very different sizes. It's not like Stephen King writes children's books, or that his stories are any more simple than LOTR. It's just like with code: You have people using a small(er) subset of a language but express similarly complex ideas (algorithms), while others enjoy using less commonly used language features. Both methods can get the job done beautifully in the right hands. One has the advantage of being more (easily) accessible (and to a larger amount of readers) though.

By the way, my next level in "word acquisition" came through reading The Economist and a few other magazines of similarly exalted vocabulary. Again I had to look up at least ten words per article when I started.

Which reminds me: Is there a service that manages to categorize books by looking at the set of words they contain (and possibly sentence structure/grammar)? Might be quite useful as a niche service for foreigners learning a language. The obvious and simple answer is to sort by intended audience (e.g. books for children and young people vs. sciency books), but as my Stephen King vs Tolkien example shows, the overall level does not have to be different at all just because one uses a smaller set of words.

> categorize books by looking at the set of words they contain

Sometimes books are tagged with a "vocabulary level" or "reading level". A search on those pops up some possible answers, e.g. https://library.austintexas.libanswers.com/faq/40667

Multiple people have recommended Simenon to me for learning French.

I read mostly non fiction but mystery novels are the one fiction genre I never mind reading. I read it like a (roundabout) lesson on the character of a time and place. I'd previously read London's Sherlock, Belgium's Poirot (written by the English Agatha Christie), LA's Philip Marlowe and France's Lupin (good reads, but the translations are poor quality).

I picked up Pietr the Latvian recently in a search for more Continental novels in the 18th and 19th century. I've started another Maigret novel since. Georges Simenon is a pretty incredible author given his serial output. Likewise the translators mentioned in the article did excellent work. I highly recommend these translated Maigret novels for both the plot and the wordsmithing.

I would recommend you the yellow dog, the first part specially is pretty good creating an atmosphere of mistery and danger. They aren't horror stories in any case. Is more about building characters and creating a good sense of inmersion in the landscape and history.

This one [0]? Thanks!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Dog_(novel)

I assumed they meant https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chien_jaune, one of the best Maigret stories.

(Why is it a capital C in the Wikipedia article?)

Ah, that makes much more sense. Thank you.

> Why is it a capital C in the Wikipedia article?

That is the way book titles are capitilized in french: the first word excluding articles gets a capital letter. It is also according to this word that the book will be sorted.

Same for "La Tête d'un homme", previous book in the series.

Interesting. I didn't know that. The Oxford Style Manual confirms what you say. (I'm not sure whether it's telling you to do that when quoting a French title in English; it might just be talking about what to do when a book title appears in a passage in French.)

Apparently the rule doesn't apply to the actual title page: the 1968 copy, which I happen to have and was able, somewhat surprisingly, to find in less than 60 seconds, has "Le chien jaune" on the title page, page 3.

Have you read Léo Malet [1]? His Nestor Burma novels, set around WW2, are great. Dark and somewhat cynical, they go deep into pre- and post-war France. "120 Rue de la Gare" is one of my favourites.

The great illustrator Jacques Tardi has also adapted many of his novels. The adaptations are great, with Tardi's famous expressionist style bringing something completely new to the stories.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9o_Malet

I haven't. Thanks for the rec!

Also great, and in my opinion, quite Simenonesque: Missing Person [1] by Patrick Modiano (the French winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in literature).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Missing-Person-Verba-Mundi-Book/dp/15...

Can I humbly suggest a few more “detectives with literary ambitions” you may or may not know already?

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho is a survivor of Franco’s purges, solving crimes and describing recipes in late-1980s Barcelona. (Spanish)

Andrea Camilleri’s Salvo Montalbano brings justice to the decadent and complicated Sicilian society of today. (Italian)

Both spawned several books, and have been translated to most languages at some point or another. Both draw a lot from Simenon, but have their distinctive styles (Camilleri in the Italian original uses a pidgin dialect that calls to Gadda and Joyce; and MVM is obsessed with food and politics).

Both are on my list. :) But thank you for the confirmation! I've seen a few episodes of a Pepe Carvalho TV show in Spanish (no subs I could find) but haven't yet gotten around to reading it yet.

Thank for the suggestions.

I also keep my eye on NYRB Classics Suspense/Crime offerings as they have a pretty good international selection (some Simenon included):

https://www.nyrb.com/collections/classics/suspense-crime

That's an ad for the new release of the translations, imitating an article. Read Monsieur Monde Vanishes instead if you want to read some Simenon, it's a better book.

The new translations are indeed mentioned in passing, but the piece is a good introduction for people who don't know the author.

Quite. I suspect many, like myself, mainly know Maigret from the television series starring Rowan Atkinson (yes!).

Maigret is probably second only to Poirot and Holmes for number of tv adaptations. In Italy we had one in the mid-60’s that was very good, if a bit theatrical.

I haven't read it since, but "The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By" had quite an impact on my teenager self.

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