Letter to my judge

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Letter to my judge (French original title: Lettre à mon juge ) is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon , which was written from December 5th to 15th, 1946 in Bradenton Beach , Florida . The novel was published in July of the following year by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité , after it had previously been printed from April 3 to June 5, 1947 in 10 episodes of the weekly Nuit et Jour . The German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1961 .

A judge is the only person who feels understood by the accused in a murder trial. After his conviction, he writes him a long letter in which he tells of his uneventful and alienated life, his great love, which brought passion and happiness into his existence for the first time, and his deed with which he ended everything.

content

St. Louis Church in La Roche-sur-Yon

The convicted murderer Charles Alavoine wrote down his life story in a letter to his examining magistrate, Ernest Coméliau, because he believed that only he could understand him. In contrast to the bourgeois Coméliau, Alavoine comes from a farming family in the Vendée department . After the suicide of his father, a notorious drinker, he was raised by his mother, who long remained decisive in his life. For her sake, he studied medicine, worked as a country doctor and married the docile pharmacist's daughter Jeanne, who bore him two daughters, but died of complications in the second birth. When his desire for women in the countryside got him upset, Alavoine and his mother moved to the town of La Roche-sur-Yon , where he established a thriving practice. There he met the dignified widow Armande, who soon moved into his house, took over his mother's rules and became his second wife without ever loving her.

One evening just before Christmas, he is now forty years old, Alavoine meets the twenty-five- year-old secretary Martine Englebert in Caen , who travels to La Roche-sur-Yon to look for work. For the first time, the doctor, who has so far indifferently drifted through life, is gripped by a strong passion. To prevent Martine from working for the greasy department store owner Bouquet, he employs her in his practice and introduces her to the marital apartment. The love affair does not remain a secret for long, and when Armande catches her husband and his lover red-handed, he is almost relieved that he is finally forced to make a decision.

Alavoine leaves his family and moves with Martine to Issy-les-Moulineaux , where he takes over a practice in a poor neighborhood. The lovers spend a few happy months, but their relationship is always overshadowed by Alavoine's insatiable jealousy of the “other” Martine, the easy-going young woman who has gotten involved with many other men before him. He begins to hit his beloved, who tolerates his outbursts of violence, and the thought that he will kill her one day becomes more and more entrenched in him.

Alavoine strangled Martine on a Sunday in September. He has the feeling that their love has reached its peak, but he cannot free himself from his ghosts, which over and over again overlay the sight of the loved one with pictures of the "other" Martine. He only survived the trial and the time in prison in faith that Martine and her love lived on in him. In order not to let her die after his death, he records his memories for his examining magistrate. On the same day that Coméliau received the letter, Alavoine committed suicide in the prison hospital.

background

Lettre à mon juge is one of the first novels that Simenon wrote after moving to the American continent. This was preceded in the first half of 1946 by Trois Chambres à Manhattan , Maigret à New York , Au bout du rouleau and Le Clan des Ostendais . Then there was a break of six months, which, according to Pierre Assouline, always heralded a Simenon classic. Not only the first-person narrative form was unusual for the author , but also the process of creating the novel, which Simenon drafted on Bradenton Beach in early November. According to Patrick Marnham, Simenon typed the final version "in the stifling December heat of Florida" with a few sweatbands on into his typewriter at his desk.

Like Simenon's first American novel Trois Chambres à Manhattan , Lettre à mon juge was fed primarily by Simenon's passionate encounter at the end of 1945 with the French- Canadian Denyse Ouimet, who was to become his second wife. The doctor Alavoine reminds in many traits of Simenon himself, who was also haunted by "ghosts" of jealousy. Martine, although like the author, comes from Liège , is modeled after Denyse and even has an operation scar on her abdomen like this one. Alavoine's wife is reminiscent of Simenon's first wife Tigy in her asexuality, and his dominant mother of Simenon's own mother. It is typical for Simenon to use his own life story, to distill the dark moments from it and to process it into a novel. Over the years, Alavoine's violence towards his beloved remained an essential feature of Simenon's relationship with Denyse, which, as she later recalled, he had slapped in the face while the novel was being written.

According to Patrick Marnham, with Les Vacances de Maigret , a second, thematically very similar novel was needed , in which the fatal jealousy of a doctor is depicted to finally scare away Simenon's ghosts. To André Gide Simenon wrote: "It has taken twelve months in order Lettre à mon juge to write. I don't know if it was worth it. I wrote it to free myself from my ghosts and not to commit the deed my hero committed. Since then, for over a year now, I've had the feeling of living a new life, one as plump and juicy as a fruit. ”In an interview with the newspaper Combat in 1959, he saw Trois Chambres à Manhattan , Lettre à mon juge , Antoine et Julie and Feux Rouges as essential stages of his work, which has passed from the motif of resignation to that of a fulfilled life.

interpretation

Peter Kaiser calls Lettre à mon juge the "document of an obsession". For Ansgar Lange , two people cling to each other like drowning people only to end up drowning together, although it remains open whether their love was passion or delusion. Simenon draws on the myth of the femme fatale , which is seductive and vulnerable at the same time. Patrick Marnham sees Trois Chambres à Manhattan and Lettre à mon juge as two of Simenon's “most important studies on sexual jealousy and obsession”. In both cases, lovers go to the edge of the abyss of their experiences. While the first book takes a positive turn, Lettre à mon juge goes one step further. The “ghosts” of jealousy become overwhelming for Alavoine, the story without hope can only lead to death. With the murder, Alavoine, according to Becker, exorcises that part of Martine that had always stood between her love. With his suicide he tries to reunite with her and finally announces: “We have gone as far as possible. We did everything we could. We wanted absolute love. "

David Platten compares Lettre à mon juge with Flaubert's Madame Bovary , where the monotony of provincial life is also contrasted with the lofty plans of an extramarital affair. But while Flaubert parodies both ways of life, Simenon clearly takes sides in his novel for love, which may have a destructive effect, but is always preferable to a bland bourgeois existence. Alavoine senses that life has more to offer than has ever been given to it. Although he succeeds in breaking out of the prison of his social milieu in the end, he in turn becomes the prison guard of his beloved. On their last day together, they both recognize each other in a pair of chimpanzees in the zoo, which huddle together under the gaze of visitors. The lovers have created their own prison behind invisible bars, which only leaves them with a way out to death. For Pierre Assouline, Avaloine is a prototype of the Simenonian hero, who from an average existence is no longer able to control his fate and almost inevitably stumbles towards the abyss. He describes himself in the novel as an "occasional criminal".

However, like many other works by Simenon, the novel is also an expression of an urgent need for communication and an understanding that has no place in the judiciary. The first lines emphasize Alavoine's desperate efforts to reach this understanding: “My judge, one person, only one person should understand me. And I want you to be that person. ”Elsewhere, Alavoine utters one of Simenon's credo:“ It is a terrifying thought that although we are all human and all arching our backs under an unknown sky, we refuse to adopt one To make a little effort to understand each other. ”The irony of the novel is that Alavoine turns to Judge Coméliau of all people, Maigret's antagonist in the Maigret novels, whose class and moral prejudices consistently obscure his view of human truth. Lucille F. Becker is also inclined to negatively answer the open question at the end of the novel, whether Alavoine achieved understanding through his letter, since the human being in Simenon's worldview remains locked in his loneliness.

reception

The English translation of the Act of Passion became one of Simenon's bestsellers in his adopted American home. By 1958 it had sold 350,000 times. The Saturday Review concluded , "Perhaps inevitably, Simenon has chosen to abandon the static form of detective stories and write novels about the eternal conflict of good and evil." Similarly, Kirkus Reviews found the novel to be more of a psychological examination of the motives for murder than that Criminal investigations from earlier years, making Lettre à mon juge in the tradition of Simenon's successes La Neige était sale and Le Temps d'Anaïs . Anthony Boucher in the New York Times saw Simenon hung "more verbose, more pretentious, and a good deal less effective" than in his early works. There would hardly be a Maigret story that was not superior to the novel, whether as entertainment or serious literature.

Meanwhile, however, Letter to my Judge has become one of Simenon's most respected novels. He was among those of Simenon's works that particularly impressed Henry Miller . John Banville spoke of a "dark and frightening book like all of Simenon's romans durs (hard novels)". François Bondy saw Simenon in the novel at "the height of this mastery" for "intensive concentration and simplification". The SPÖ magazine Die Zukunft gave a similar verdict : "A miracle what Simenon can create in terms of atmosphere with his tight style."

In 1952, the film version Le fruit défendu (German: Forbidden Fruit ) was released. Directed by Henri Verneuil , Fernandel , Sylvie , Françoise Arnoul , Claude Nollier , Jacques Castelot and Raymond Pellegrin , among others , played . According to Lucille F. Becker, the film reveals the original novel in every imaginable way and precisely because of this it becomes one of the more successful Simenon adaptations. What remains of the novel's moral ambiguity and deadly obsession is a simple triangular story in which Don Camillo actor Fernandel stands between duty and temptation and with the happy ending of his return to his faithful wife, the moral expectations of the film audience are satisfied.

In 1985 the Bayerischer Rundfunk produced a radio play directed by Wolf Euba . The main roles were spoken by Peter Dirschauer , Else Quecke , Irene Clarin , Ilse Neubauer and Elisabeth Volkmann . Hans Peter Bögel read the novel for Südwestrundfunk . Frank Focketyn played Charles Alavoine in the one-person play Brief aan meen Rechter, directed by Johan Simons . The premiere was on November 13th, 2009 in the NTGent city ​​theater in Ghent .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Lettre à mon juge . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1947 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Letter to my judge . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1961.
  • Georges Simenon: Letter to my judge . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1969.
  • Georges Simenon: Letter to my judge . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau. Diogenes, Zurich 1977, ISBN 3-257-20371-3 (first unabridged edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Letter to my judge . Selected novels in 50 volumes, volume 26. Translation: Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau. Diogenes, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-257-24126-6 .

literature

  • David Platten: Lettre à mon juge: a litany to freedom . In: David Platten: The Pleasures of Crime. Reading Modern French Crime Fiction . Rodopi, Amsterdam 2011. ISBN 978-90-420-3429-7 , pp. 60-68.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ^ Lettre à mon juge in the bibliography of Yves Martina.
  3. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 92.
  4. ↑ a b Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 239.
  5. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 315.
  6. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 307.
  7. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 300-301.
  8. ^ I Married Maigret by Denise Simenon . In: Woman's Own, November 11, 1961, pp. 14-15.
  9. ↑ a b Patrick Marnham: The man who was not Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 326.
  10. ^ Pierre Assouline: Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 259.
  11. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 314.
  12. ↑ Peter Kaiser: Logical ( memento of the original from June 19, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.litges.at archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on litges.at.
  13. ↑ a b Ansgar Lange: Simenon - Letter to my judge ( Memento of the original from May 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In: PT Magazin of April 2, 2012.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.pt-magazin.de
  14. ↑ David plates: Lettre à mon juge: a litany to freedom . In: David Platten: The Pleasures of Crime. Reading Modern French Crime Fiction . Rodopi, Amsterdam 2011. ISBN 978-90-420-3429-7 , p. 66.
  15. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 315-316.
  16. ↑ a b Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon. House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 118.
  17. ↑ Georges Simenon: Letter to my judge . Diogenes, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-257-24126-6 , p. 250.
  18. ↑ David plates: Lettre à mon juge: a litany to freedom . In: David Platten: The Pleasures of Crime. Reading Modern French Crime Fiction . Rodopi, Amsterdam 2011, ISBN 978-90-420-3429-7 , pp. 65, 67.
  19. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 299-300.
  20. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon. House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 117.
  21. ↑ Georges Simenon: Letter to my judge . Diogenes, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-257-24126-6 , p. 5.
  22. ↑ Georges Simenon: Letter to my judge . Diogenes, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-257-24126-6 , p. 183.
  23. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 300.
  24. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 312, 316.
  25. ^ Act of Passion by Georges Simenon on Kirkus Reviews
  26. ^ "He is simply more wordy, more pretentious, and a good deal less effective. There is hardly a Maigret story that does not rank - whether as entertainment or as serious literature - well above Act of Passion. “Quoted from: Anthony Boucher : Killer Tells All . In: The New York Times, December 21, 1952.
  27. ↑ "one of his most respected novels". Quoted from: Dennis H. Drysdale: Simenon and Social Justice . In: Lewis GM Thorpe: Nottingham French Studies , Volumes 9-13. University of Nottingham, Nottingham 1970, p. 93.
  28. ^ Pierre Assouline: Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 289.
  29. ↑ "A dark and frightening book, like all of Simenon's romans durs." Quoted from: John Banville : John Banville on Literary Murders . In: The Telegraph, July 19, 2012.
  30. ^ François Bondy : The Miracle Simenon. A Balzac of our day? In: Claudia Schmölders , Christian Strich (Ed.): About Simenon . Diogenes, Zurich 1988, ISBN 3-257-20499-X , p. 73.
  31. ↑ The future . Issues 1–5, Sozialistischer Verlag, Vienna 2005, page left.
  32. ↑ Forbidden Fruit in the Internet Movie Database .
  33. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon. House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , pp. 116-119.
  34. ↑ Letter to my judge in the HörDat audio play database .
  35. ↑ Brief aan meen Rechter ( Memento of the original dated May 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ntgent.be archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the Ghent city ​​theater NTGent .