The Hatter's Fantoms (novel)

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The Hatter's Fantome (French: Les fantômes du chapelier ) is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It was written from December 2 to 13, 1948 in Tumacacori , Arizona, and was published the following year by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité . The first German translation by Eugen Helmlé was published by Diogenes Verlag in 1982 . In the same year, a French feature film by Claude Chabrol was released in which Michel Serrault and Charles Aznavour played the leading roles.

A serial killer terrifies wintry La Rochelle through the seemingly incoherent murders of five women . When another murder follows, the act forges two very different characters together: the poor little tailor Kachoudas and the respected, wealthy hat maker Labbé.

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Narrow street with old half-timbered houses in La Rochelle

In the Rue du Minage in La Rochelle, a narrow shopping street, the hat maker Léon Labbé and the tailor Kachoudas live so close together that they cannot help but be part of the life of their neighbors. In Labbé's little-frequented hat shop and his apartment everything is subdued and darkened; the journeyman Valentin and the maid Louise Chapus show consideration for the paralyzed Madame Labbé, who cannot stand anyone but her husband around, and of whom only a silhouette can be seen at the window. The lively hustle and bustle of the Kachoudas, an immigrant family with four children, is very different, from whose house there is noise and the smell of exotic spices. The little tailor has to work late into the night in order to raise the meager wages for his wife and children. The interaction between hat maker and tailor is polite but distant. Only in the evenings does the men from different milieus take a common path to the Café de Colonnes , with Kachoudas always following the man in front at a respectable distance of a few steps.

It is December 3rd when the tailor tries to wipe a piece of newspaper from the hem of his friend in the café. The cut-out letters suddenly awaken the realization in Kachoudas that the person opposite is the author of those anonymous letters that a serial killer sends to the young reporter Jeantet from the local newspaper L'Écho des Charantes . The murders of five elderly women have been terrifying the city for several weeks now, so that no one dares to go out into the streets at night. That same evening, Kachoudas received confirmation that Labbé was indeed the culprit when he murdered the sixth victim before his eyes. The tailor is torn between naked fear and the longing hope for the reward of 20,000 francs. But the hatter knows only too well that the social outsider will not dare to go to the police without solid evidence and only feels mocking pity for his frightened confidante. The murderer's main concern is to explain to the public in his letters the reasons for his actions, which he himself considers to be inevitable.

For over 15 years, Labbé suffered from his wife, whom he had to care for because of her progressive illness, and felt bullied, exploited and humiliated. One day the pent-up anger broke through, he strangled his wife and buried her in the basement of the house. Since then he has only pretended to the others that the paralyzed woman continues to spend her days alone in her room, where her husband takes care of her sacrificially. In truth, a hatter's head is just draped on the window to simulate its silhouette. But on Christmas Eve the disappearance of the murdered woman threatens to become public, because on that day she receives regular visits from six old school friends. So Labbé set out coldly calculating to kill all his wife's acquaintances with a cello string by Christmas. After eliminating the risk of discovery with the six friends, the serial killer could retreat back to his usual life, but he can't get the prophecy of the journalist Jeantet out of his head, according to which the murders will only stop once the perpetrator is caught be. In addition, he is burdened by the illness of his only confidante, the tailor Kachoudas, whose condition deteriorates day by day under his eyes. He doesn't dare to face the neighbor in order not to increase his panic.

In fact, the series of murders continues when the hatter becomes so infatuated with his hatred of the housemaid Louise that he also kills her. While he can still routinely cover up this from Commissioner Pigeac, the unexpected death of the sick tailor throws him off course. Not for the murders of the eight women, but for the death of his terrified confidante, Labbé feels responsible for the first time. And he realizes that he cannot return to his house, where not only the corpses of his wife and the maid are waiting for him, but also the cries of Kachoudas' widow could be heard across the street. Instead he seeks out the prostitute Berthe and strangles her. When the superintendent confronts the sleeping hatter in the morning, he is relieved to finally be able to confess his deeds.

background

Café de la Paix in La Rochelle

Immediately before and during the Second World War , Georges Simenon lived on the French Atlantic coast, including a few years in La Rochelle , where he felt particularly comfortable. A total of nine novels from his work are set in whole or in part in the city, a number that is only exceeded by the setting in Paris. Simenon's favorite place in La Rochelle, the Café de la Paix on Grand-Place , can be found in the novel Die Fantome des Hutmachers as Café de Colonnes and serves as an evening meeting place for local celebrities. His regular card game in the café becomes a leitmotif of the novel.

Simenon had prepared the novel The Hatter's Fantome with two short stories based on the same material: The Little Tailor and the Hatter (French: Le petit tailleur et le chapelier ) and Blessed are the meek (French: Bénis soient les humbles ) . While the first short story is still completely written from the perspective of the tailor, who learns that his neighbor is a wanted mass murderer, the novel focuses on the hatter with his daily routine and his mental state.

The figure of the little Jewish tailor is a recurring motif in Simenon's work, for example in Monsieur Hire's engagement from 1933. It is often used as a symbol of social exclusion, alienation and loneliness. In Die Fantome des Hutmachers , too , the tailor Kachoudas is socially isolated and is cut by the city's established citizens. A similar figure is the Jew Jonas Milk in The Arkhangelsk Bookseller . Simenon was so touched by Charles Aznavour's cinematic portrayal of the Armenian tailor that he would have liked him to play the leading role in a film adaptation of the bookseller.

interpretation

According to Hans-Christoph Blumenberg , Simenon dispenses with the usual tension devices of the thriller genre in Die Fantome des Hutmachers . The killer is certain from the start. When Kachoudas discovers his secret, he does not turn to the police, but “reluctantly falls under the spell of evil”. Both the hatter and the tailor are not monsters, but people who are torn from their ordinary existence by extraordinary events and "get deeper and deeper into a vortex of fear, self-loathing and secret mutual attraction." The novel draws for Peter Kaiser “The psychogram of a serial killer with all of its subjective logic”, in which the first impulsive act develops into an uncontrollable dynamic of its own.

Julian Symons considers the plot on which the novel is based with the concealment of the death of Labbé's wife and the following six murders of her school friends to be hardly credible. Simenon's trick is to introduce the hatter figure from the tailor's point of view and then to focus almost entirely on the relationship between the two men. The growing bond that Labbé feels for his neighbor leads to deep disturbance when the tailor falls ill, and ultimately to Labbé's end after Kachoudas dies. Despite the incredible serial murders, the hatter's participation in the tailor's fate is described in a credible, compassionate and touching manner.

reception

According to Oliver Hahn from maigret.de, Die Fantome des Hutmachers is a “classic among the non-Maigrets” and he counts it among the five best novels by Simenon without his detective Maigret . For Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, too, it is “certainly one of his best novels”. The Italian daily La Stampa sees the novel as being carried “by geometrically designed narrative tension, by refined artistry”.

For Peter Kaiser, the novel creates "an anxiety that seems to be felt physically and that manifests itself as a two-hundred-page fascinating horror". Andreas Eschbach remembers his first encounter with a Simenon novel, when he picked up The Hatter's Fantome because of its strange title. The first few lines describing a cold, wet December already seemed so realistic to him that he shut the book in shock because he "had the feeling for a moment that the page felt wet."

As early as 1976, Julian Symons recognized in Die Fantoms des Hutmachers , not least because of Simenon's austere, unliterary style, more of a film script that could serve as the basis of a fabulous film than actually a fabulous novel. The French director Claude Chabrol showed an early interest in making Simenon's novel as a film. In 1982 his film adaptation of The Hatter's Fantome with Michel Serrault as Hatter Labbé and Charles Aznavour as Tailor Kachoudas came into the cinemas. According to Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, the director used Simenon's original artwork almost like a script, as it is almost impossible to rewrite a novel by the Belgian. Chabrol emphasized how little actually happened in the novel.

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Les fantômes du chapelier . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1949 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: The Hatter's Fantome . Translation: Eugen Helmlé. Diogenes, Zurich 1982, ISBN 3-257-21001-9 .
  • Georges Simenon: The Hatter's Fantome . Selected novels in 50 volumes, volume 27. Translation: Eugen Helmlé. Diogenes, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-257-24127-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Les fantômes du chapelier 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. 96.
  4. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 30.
  5. ^ Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 185.
  6. ↑ a b c The hatmaker's Fantome on maigret.de.
  7. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 298.
  8. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 77.
  9. ^ Pierre Assouline: Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 390.
  10. ↑ a b c Hans-Christoph Blumenberg : Man is never guilty . In: Die Zeit of November 12, 1982.
  11. ↑ a b Peter Kaiser: The Hatter's Loneliness ( Memento of the original from May 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.
  12. ↑ a b Julian Symons : The Hatter's Phantoms and Maigret and the Apparition by Georges Simenon . In: The New York Times, November 21, 1976.
  13. ↑ The five best on maigret.de.
  14. ↑ Die Fantome des Hutmachers ( Memento of the original from December 15, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The 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. at Diogenes Verlag .  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.diogenes.de
  15. ↑ Andreas Eschbach : Without a plan to the goal . In: Olaf Kutzmutz (Ed.): First read. Then write. 22 authors and their teachers . Luchterhand, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-630-62115-9 , p. 120.