The Mayor of Furnes

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The Mayor of Furnes (French original title: Le Bourgmestre de Furnes ) is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It was completed on December 29, 1938 in Nieul-sur-Mer and published from May 1 to July 1, 1939 in the literary magazine La Revue de Paris . In the same year, the Editions Gallimard published a book edition of the novel. The German translation by Hanns Grössel was published in 1984 by Diogenes Verlag and 35 years later with an afterword by Martin Mosebach also by Kampa Verlag .

The mayor of the small Belgian town of Furnes is feared both professionally and privately because of his harshness and aloofness. The hard-heartedness towards one of his workers becomes the starting point of a scandal that first shakes the city and then the life of its mayor.

content

The Stadhuis (town hall) of Furnes

The cigar manufacturer Joris Terlinck, generally just called Baas , is mayor of the small Belgian town of Furnes. He rules the city with a hard hand and treats his subordinates just as harshly and dismissively as his rivals in local politics, especially the circle around his predecessor Léonard Van Hamme. He is also a tyrant in private life. He sows with his unloved wife Theresa, the insane daughter Emilia vegetates, medically and hygienically neglected, in a locked room. Without hiding it, he sleeps with the housemaid Maria, but does not recognize her illegitimate son Albert. He owes the basis of his fortune to a coolly calculated affair with the wealthy widow Bertha de Groote.

One evening when Jef Claes, a worker from Terlinck's factory, asks for an advance on his salary to finance the abortion of his girlfriend who has become pregnant by mistake, Terlinck remains as adamant as ever in financial matters and shows the young man the door. Claes sees no alternative but to shoot himself. He also fires a shot at his girlfriend, who turns out to be Lina Van Hamme, the daughter of Terlinck's opponent. A scandal ensues, as a result of which Van Hamme is forced to resign and cast off his daughter, whose illegitimate pregnancy has brought disgrace to the family.

Joris Terlinck can triumph. In Furnes he is now more powerful than ever. The vacant office of dikemaster is awarded to him. But in the otherwise so callous power man, remorse arises because of the young girl who has to suffer from the consequences of his hard-heartedness. He tracks down Lina Van Hamme in Ostend , where the heavily pregnant woman is staying with the prostitute Manola in a brothel. From now on he begins to visit her regularly. If his motive was initially compassion, the sluggish, sweetish atmosphere of the brothel, removed from everyday life, soon exerts its own charm on Terlinck. He begins to neglect his duties, skips the council meetings in Furnes and leaves his terminally ill wife to the care of his sister-in-law Marthe so that he can spend as much time as possible in Ostend.

Finally, in a council meeting, there is a confrontation with the resurgent opponent Van Hamme, whom Terlinck throws at the head for having bought his daughter. The mayor, who has long since gambled away the trust of the councilors, loses a critical vote on which he linked his future and resigns. Therese dies that same night of her serious illness. Emilia is picked up a few days later and taken to a psychiatric clinic. Terlinck asks his unloved sister-in-law Marthe to stay in the house. He is no longer returning to Ostend, but something has become clear to him that he tried in vain to convey in his last speech as mayor: Everyone is bound by duties in his life, but he could also start a completely different life at any time.

interpretation

Nicole Geeraert uses The Mayor of Furnes to analyze a basic form of Simenon's “hard” novel (“roman durs”), which are not detective novels in the narrower sense and in which Inspector Maigret is not the main character. The initial situation is often characterized by a lack, in the case of the mayor, a lack of love and warmth. The protagonist tries to compensate for this, in the case of Joris Terlinck by excessive zeal for work. But a sudden event or misfortune reveals the shortage; it is no longer bearable for the main character. The occasion for this in the mayor is the suicide of Jef Claes. The main character rethinks her life, breaks out of her previous paths and transgresses the laws that previously applied to her life with a feeling of invincibility or fatality. On the other hand, those around you oppose liberation, and conflict arises. The self-knowledge of the main character leads to a kind of confession, but instead of a successful outbreak of resignation, a broken heart or the downfall of the hero. For Joris Terlinck, for example, life goes on in its usual way in the end.

Stanley G. Eskin sees The Mayor of Furnes in a number of "Escape" novels written during this period of Simenon's career, such as The Murderer (1936), The Man Who Watched the Trains (1938), The White Ross (1938) and Doctor Bergelon (1941). At Simenon, however, the "escape-on-the-spot" motif, as Eskin calls it and as it also characterizes the mayor, is just as common as an actual escape . Terlinck's escape has two aspects for him: an unclear relationship with Lina, which changes from initial reparation to a kind of erotic infatuation, and an alienation from his hometown. But the more Terlinck loses the sympathies of the citizens of Furnes and is downright ostracized by them, the more he wins the sympathies of readers through the change in his personality.

Franz Schuh, on the other hand, discovers a "betrayal of love" in the novel, which he claims to have identified in a similar way in an unnamed Simenon novel about a surgeon (probably Maigret is wrong here ): The betrayal of a love in order to maintain a misfortune: "From the usual misfortune a suction goes out. The addict doesn't want to trade luck with it ”. Terlinck did not even feel or even experience real love. Everything remains in the vague, "in the realm of the possible". What is clearly evident for Schuh, however, is “a perfect horror of a (Flemish) small town, of its climate, its buildings, of its people.” Heartlessness, social Darwinism and dying “on the back burner” reign there, and Simenon proves to be a “chronicler of their doomed desires ”.

background

The Grote Markt in Furnes

The mayor of Furnes is one of the few novels by Simenon set in his Belgian homeland, along with Das Haus am Kanal (1933). Others - such as Maigret among the Flemings (1932) and Chez Krull (1938) - are located in the Franco-Belgian border area. Nevertheless, Simenon added a preliminary remark to the novel: “I don't know Furnes. I don't know its mayor or its residents. Furnes is just like a musical motif to me . So I hope that no one will recognize himself in any of the characters in my story. ”However, Simenon later admitted that he only made this declaration for legal reasons. On the contrary, he emphasized the fact that he never wrote about places he did not know. He even knows Furnes very well and had it vividly in mind when he was writing the novel. As early as 1933 he had written a report in Voilà about tobacco smugglers whose routes led him through Furnes, Veurne in Flemish , among other places . He was particularly impressed by the Grote Markt , the town's large market square, around which the action in The Mayor of Furnes is based.

When the mayor of Furnes was writing , Simenon reached his psychological limits. He always worked in a kind of intoxicated state, at the end of Mayor's office in December 1938 he had reached a "real hallucinatory state" and had to withdraw from writing for a while, fearing that his work would cause psychological damage. In addition to personal experiences, which always play a major role in Simenon's novels, Pierre Assouline also sees the mayor of Furnes as influenced by literature he has read, in particular La Séquestrée de Poitiers ( The Enclosed One of Poitiers , 1930) by Simenon's friend and colleague André Gide . In any case, according to Stanley G. Eskin, the novel was "a success with the critics".

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Le Bourgmestre de Furnes . Gallimard, Paris 1939 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: The Mayor of Furnes . Translation: Hanns Grössel . Diogenes, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-257-21209-7 .
  • Georges Simenon: The Mayor of Furnes . Selected novels in 50 volumes, volume 17. Translation: Hanns Grössel. Diogenes, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-257-24117-4 .
  • Georges Simenon: The Mayor of Furnes . Translation: Hanns Grössel. Kampa, Zurich 2019, ISBN 978-3-311-13336-0 .
  • Georges Simenon: The Mayor of Furnes . Translation: Hanns Grössel. Reading by Gerd Wameling . The Audio Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-7424-1036-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1924 à 1945 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of the Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Le bourgmestre de Furnes 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. 93.
  4. ↑ The Mayor of Furnes on kampaverlag.ch, accessed on May 12, 2019.
  5. ^ Nicole Geeraert: Georges Simenon. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-499-50471-5 , pp. 60-66.
  6. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 226-227.
  7. ↑ Franz Schuh : Death and betrayal of love . In: The time of September 9, 1999.
  8. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , p. 187.
  9. ↑ Quoted from Georges Simenon: The Mayor of Furnes . The Audio Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-7424-1036-8 , Track 1.
  10. ^ Philippe Proost: Cahiers Simenon 30/2017: Furnes . In: revues.be 2017.
  11. ↑ Michel Lemoine, Michel Carly: Les Chemins Belges de Simenon. Editions du Céfal, Liège 2003, ISBN 2-87130-127-1 , pp. 136-137.
  12. ^ "A genuine hallucinatory state". Quoted from: Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 142.
  13. ^ Pierre Assouline: Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 346.
  14. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 226.