The house on the canal

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The house on the canal (French: La maison du canal ) is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon , which was written in January 1933 in Marsilly , Charente-Maritime . After an advance publication in four episodes of the magazine La Revue de France from April 1 to May 15 of that year, the book edition was published in May 1933 by the French publisher Fayard as one of Simenon's first non- Maigret novels. The first German translation by Walter Jonas was published by the Schlesische Verlagsanstalt in 1935 under the title Die Hexe . In 1986 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Ursula Vogel under the title Das Haus am Kanal .

A 16-year-old orphan from Brussels comes to live with relatives in Flanders on a lonely estate. The city child, who does not speak a word of Flemish , does not find it easy to move to the rural surroundings. But the pubescent girl soon becomes aware of the effect she has on her two cousins. As she begins to use her power over the younger, the older follows in the footsteps of his late father and runs the business in the house on the canal.

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Mill in Neeroeteren

16-year-old Edmée is an orphan . After the mother died at birth, her father, a doctor in Brussels, also died a few days ago. Her guardian then sent her to live with relatives in Limburg in a lonely house on the Schiffers Canal near the village of Neeroeteren . When the girl arrives, her uncle has just died of gangrene from an untreated wound . Now her cousin, 21-year-old Fred Van Elst, takes over the estate, on which his withdrawn mother, 19-year-old brother Jef, 17-year-old sister Mia and three younger siblings live. The next of kin is Uncle Louis, a cigar manufacturer from nearby Maeseyck .

Edmée struggles to get used to the strange environment. She doesn't speak Flemish, only the three older siblings understand French. The spoiled city child refuses any housework or other activity with which she could be useful. For her, Flemings are peasants with coarse features and no taste or manners, while her cousins ​​openly admire them for their city fashion, their grace and their flawless skin. Soon the girl gains power over her cousin Jef, an uncouth chump with a soft heart. She instigates him to hunt squirrels , from whose fur he sews a carpet for her, but with a pleasant shiver she announces to him that the man she wants to marry must be able to kill people too. Jef puts a lot of effort into making a jewelry box for his cousin, and he steals the precious stones from the church measuring cup for her , which, however, turn out to be worthless replicas.

The older brother Fred, however, initially shows no interest in his cousin. He flirts with the buxom baker's daughter and, according to rumors, has a mistress in Hasselt , where he regularly spends the night. But when he becomes aware of how the city child Edmée is turning the heads of all the men in the village, he too begins to be interested in the girl, who is very different from all the women he knows. Several times he makes rough approaches. Eventually, a young boy witnesses an attempted rape in the forest. Angry, Fred throws the boy to the ground, where he hits his head and lies dead. Edmée, Fred and Jef, who had joined them, agree to remain silent about the crime and sink the boy's body in the sewer.

Feelings of guilt about the dead boy and her awakening sexuality upset Edmée's emotional life. In the winter cold, she contracted bronchitis that does not want to heal. Uncle Louis introduces the girl to a doctor in Hasselt, who diagnoses mild tuberculosis . Edmée takes the opportunity to track down her cousin Fred in town, who is throwing money around in an animated bar. The subsequent audit by Uncle Louis reveals that his nephew is embezzling money from the court to finance his regular trips to Hasselt. Only Edmée understands her cousin's longing to break out, and when the little boy's red cap appears in the canal, she grows uncomfortable in the strange surroundings. Fred, knowing that he will have to leave the farm, wants to move into town with her to marry her. Although Edmée is told by Mia that Jef will kill her if she marries his brother, she gives him her "yes" in front of the assembled family.

Two years later, the examining magistrate Coosemans was called to a murder case in Antwerp . The deceased is Edmée Van Elst, whose husband Fred now works as a secretary for a shipping company. The culprit is found quickly. It is his brother Jef, who together with the rest of the Van Elst family had to give up their father's farm and now lives from the production and sale of sweets. Jef lets himself be arrested without resistance. When the public prosecutor asked why he raped and strangled his sister-in-law, he asks what he would have done in his place. The following night, Jef takes his own life.

interpretation

For Maria Ehing, the house on the canal is already an unusual detective novel in its external structure , in which the focus is not on uncovering a crime, but on the psychological background and processes that inevitably lead to such a crime. The crime itself is only committed at the very end, and the perpetrator is immediately convicted. It is not vengeance that drove Jef to act, but the atonement for a guilt that Edmée has incurred. It was she who instigated her cousin to commit sacrilege , the theft of the supposed precious stones of a chalice, which in Simenon's irony turn out to be completely worthless. However, she refused her cousin the wages for the act, whereupon the rejected person executes the criminal court on her and in the end also draws the final conclusions for his own life.

According to Ehing, Edmée appears in the shape of a “big city slut” as a foreign element in the uniform course of life of a Flemish peasant family. In doing so, she discovers that her otherness gives her an unknown power over her cousins. Stanley G. Eskin characterizes Fred as a "rural playboy" and "lascivious prasser", Jef on the other hand as a " Quasimodo type" who fails in his courtship for the girl because of his enormous naivety. While Jef immediately becomes unconditionally submissive to the girl, according to Peter Kaiser , it takes a while before his brother, too, falls for "the anemic city ​​child" with his provocative arrogance and aloofness. In her “pubescent power frenzy”, Edmée confuses the entire family. It undermines the traditional peasant order and is the cause of an increasing number of misfortunes and disasters. For Behrang Samsami it is the story of a revolt against the dreary and joyless everyday life in the province. Out of boredom and the desire for diversion, Edmée sows strife and hatred between the family members. With her awakening sexuality, she sets in motion a series of events that cannot be stopped later.

For Patrick Marnham, a typical Simenon motif is already evident in the early novel: sexuality as “a potential source of shame and violence”. According to Sansani, "the ' evil ' has a sexual connotation". The characters are at the mercy of their moods, they either let themselves be driven passively or their actions are completely determined by their passions. For Eskin, a kind of “ruthless physicality” pervades the book. The bond between Jef and Edmée thus develops in a scene in which the skinning of a squirrel is described. The little boy's funeral takes up the brutal and drastic realism of the scene. The misfortune of a barge, in which the draft horses drown, is also described in naturalistic detail . Like the repeated contrast between light and shadow, there is a constant opposition in the novel between the wet and cold nature and the warmth that is always associated with sexuality.

According to Ehing, it is a "lurking and paralyzing cold" before which the action takes place. The jaded monotony of rural life, which is broken up again and again by sudden surges of passion, is reflected in the uniform, indifferent nature of the canal. And the catastrophe towards which the novel is inevitably heading also seems to be a kind of law of nature, with the relentlessness of the escalation and the details of everyday life reminiscent of Émile Zola . For Marnham, from the beginning there is “a premonition of doom”, an atmosphere of threat, in which the water of the canal does not turn out to be the elixir of life, but rather as a seemingly controlled elemental force that sweeps people and animals with it or ruins it in an instant can. Eskin sees the novel as having a “fluidity of decay and disharmony”. For Peter Kaiser, it leads right into the heart of darkness , and this without the exoticism of Joseph Conrad's story.

background

After Georges Simenon became known in 1931 and 1932 with the novels about Detective Inspector Maigret and had written a total of 17 novels in the series, he decided in autumn 1932 - following an extensive trip to Europe - to end the Maigret series and " to write real novels "with which he wanted to acquire the reputation of a" serious writer ". In the following months he wrote his first three so-called “romans durs” (hard novels): The engagement of Monsieur Hire , Tropenkoller and Das Haus am Kanal . In retrospect, Simenon referred to the latter as his “first novel”.

Sint-Petruskerk in Elen

Das Haus am Kanal is one of the few novels that Simenon, who lived in France and wrote for the French literature market, set in his Belgian homeland. The lonely house on the canal really does exist. It is the residence of the Brüll family, Simenon's maternal relatives, and is located in Elen, a district of Dilsen-Stokkem . At the age of twelve or thirteen, the young Simenon spent some time in the house, and the characters in the novel are based on real people from his family, for example his nephew, who was four years older, was named Alfred. According to Simenon's biographer Patrick Marnham, these are not detailed portraits of the family members, but rather an attempt to capture the atmosphere of his visit at the time.

In the later autobiographical novel Pedigree (German: family tree ), which Simenon wrote during the Second World War , he went back to the episode in the house of his grandfather Brüll. Many details from the novel are consistent with Das Haus am Kanal . There's an older cousin named Gaston who pretends to be the ruler of the house and a younger cousin Jef who kills squirrels. Simenon's alter ego Roger has taken the place of the girl Edmée . For Thomas Narcejac the typical approach of the author Simenon is that he falls back on real experiences, which he takes to extremes in his novels through fictional events. In doing so, he works out the characteristic properties of the characters - in this case Gaston as a secret weakling, Jef as a potential murderer - and lets them act out these with all the consequences, in a way that the real role models were never possible in reality.

reception

The house on the canal is highlighted by some critics among Simenon's novels. When it appeared, the press praised it "because of its atmospheric density". Linda Sternberg Katz and Willam A. Katz saw him among Simenon's best novels. Shirley Ann Grau even spoke of the “brooding study of evil” as the best “of Simenon's many novels”. For Raimund Petschner, the novel was one of “some very good non-Maigrets” of the “early years”. According to Patrick Marnham, the book was "exuberantly praised" by Max Jacob . Ernest Hemingway was not sure in his memories Paris - A Festival for Life whether Das Haus am Kanal or Maigret in Nöten was his first encounter with Simenon's work, which Gertrude Stein might have liked.

Mathilda May and Isild Le Besco, the two actresses from Edmée Mathilda May and Isild Le Besco, the two actresses from Edmée
Mathilda May and Isild Le Besco , the two actresses from Edmée

Stanley G. Eskin relativized the fact that the novel lacks a careful revision and structure, so that it "seems clumsy despite some brilliant approaches." Patrick Marnham criticized "some awkward changes in point of view". For Tilman Spreckelsen, the protagonists acted “too schematically” and the plot was “visibly planned”, but this is offset by the images in which the novel indulges: “Has Simenon ever designed such haunting images as the dead child that they guilty of Skaters so disturbed, or the wooden farmhouse on the canal in the eternal fog? ”His reading impression culminated in the exclamation:“ What a gruesome book, what an eerie atmosphere, what a fate that appears like a black and white film with rare artificial splashes of color developed for us. ” The Booksellers came to the surprising conclusion that the novel shows Simenon in“ one of his happier moods. ”

In 1988 Josef Rusnak filmed the novel as a German-French television film as part of the TV series L'heure Simenon . Mathilda May , Tobias Hoesl , Ralph Grobel , Christiane zu Salm and John Van Dreelen played among others . In 2003 Alain Berliner made a Belgian television film with Isild Le Besco , Corentin Lobet , Nicolas Buysse and Jean-Pierre Cassel . In 2007 the WDR produced a radio play directed by Uwe Schareck . The main roles were spoken by Katharina Schüttler , Serdar Somuncu , Christian Friedel , Claude De Demo and Thierry van Werveke .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: La maison du canal . Fayard, Paris 1933 (first edition).
  • Georg Simenon: The witch . Translation: Walter Jonas . Schlesische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 1935.
  • Georges Simenon: The house on the canal . Translation: Ursula Vogel. Diogenes, Zurich 1986, ISBN 3-257-21426-X .
  • Georges Simenon: The house on the canal . Selected novels in 50 volumes, volume 3. Translation: Ursula Vogel. Diogenes, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-257-24103-7 .
  • Georges Simenon: The house on the canal . Translation: Ursula Vogel. With an afterword by Karl-Heinz Ott . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-455-00470-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1924 à 1945 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of the Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ La maison du canal in the bibliography by 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. 100.
  4. ↑ a b c Maria Ehing: The French crime novel and one of its most outstanding representatives: Georges Simenon. In: The book. Journal of Literature, Art and Science from France 9, 1950, pp. 8–9.
  5. ^ A b Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 186.
  6. ↑ a b Peter Kaiser: No rural idyll ( memento of the original from March 3, 2014 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.
  7. ↑ a b Behrang Samsami: “The naked man” on literaturkritik.de No. 12/2011.
  8. ↑ a b Patrick Marnham: The man who was not Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 234.
  9. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 186-187.
  10. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 234-235.
  11. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 216, 233.
  12. ↑ About the house, see a photo on Flickr , as well as: De bewogen geschiedenis van “het huis aan het kanaal”  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / asp.gva.be   in a dossier on Georges Simenon in the Gazet van Antwerpen on July 19, 2001.
  13. ^ Andre de Vries: Flanders. A cultural history . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2007, ISBN 978-0-19-531493-9 , p. 251.
  14. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 233-234.
  15. ^ Thomas Narcejac : The Art of Simenon . Routledge & Kegan, London 1952, pp. 86-88.
  16. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 191.
  17. ^ "Brooding study of evil. Not a detective story, but the best of all [Simenon's] many novels. ”Quoted from: Linda Sternberg Katz and Willam A. Katz: Writer's Choice. A Library of Rediscoveries . Reston Pub, Reston 1983, ISBN 0-8359-8799-X , pp. 110-111.
  18. ↑ Raimund Petschner: The cupped hand inside the clenched fist. Thoughts on Georges Simenon . In: Die Horen , issues 181–182, p. 167.
  19. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 233.
  20. ↑ Ernest Hemingway : A moveable feast. The restored edition . Simon and Schuster, New York 2009, ISBN 978-1-4165-9131-3 , p. 59.
  21. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 187.
  22. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: The house on the canal . On: faz.net from December 11, 2010.
  23. ↑ “In these two stories Simenon on the whole is in one of his happier moods.” Quoted from: The Booksellers . Editions 2402-2416, J. Whitaker 1952, p. 666.
  24. ↑ La maison du canal. Internet Movie Database , accessed November 10, 2015 .
  25. ↑ Das Haus am Kanal in the Internet Movie Database .
  26. ↑ Das Haus am Kanal in the HörDat audio play database .