The escape of Monsieur Monde

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The Escape of Monsieur Monde (French: La fuite de Monsieur Monde ) is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It was completed on April 1, 1944 in Saint-Mesmin-le-Vieux and was published by La jeune Parque in Paris in April of the following year . The first German translation by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau was published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1970 under the title Die Flucht des Herr Monde . In 1991, Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Barbara Heller under the title The Flight of Monsieur Monde .

Monsieur Monde, the title character of the novel, is leaving his company, family and all of his previous life in Paris on his birthday . His escape leads him south to the Côte d'Azur . There he lives a simple, aimless life under a strange name at the side of a young animation girl until he meets a woman from his past again. The novel is considered to be one of the most famous non- Maigret novels by Simenon.

content

Norbert Monde is a businessman and owner of a Parisian company for commission business and export, which he diligently and conscientiously led from the bankruptcy into which his easy-going father and his mistresses almost plunged them. But Monde is not happy. One day his first wife left him without a trace, the second wife is cold and callous, and he has no closer contact with his children. Monde suffers from the burden of his work, he is depressed by an indefinite shame and he longs for that step that he once did not dare to take when he was 18: just walk away and leave his life behind.

On his 48th birthday, Monde leaves the house as usual. But when neither his family nor his employees remembered his special day, he put the longed-for escape into practice. He withdraws 300,000 francs from his account and takes the train to Marseille . He shed his old identity: he had his mustache shaved off, dressed shabbily and from then on called himself Désiré Clouet after the random name on a billboard. Monde seeks that mediocrity and boredom that enables him to live entirely in the present. When he arrives at the sea, he cries exhausted and for the first time feels that he is leaving all burden and duty behind. Even when his money is stolen, he feels downright liberated, since the ties to his previous life are only now severed.

One evening in the third-class hotel where he stayed, Monde overheard a relationship argument in the next room. When he interferes, he is able to thwart the suicide attempt of a young woman named Julie who has taken an overdose of sleeping pills by her lover. From now on he remains by their side as a protector and they travel on to Nice . In the restaurant "Monico", where she works as an animator , he gets a job as a manager, where his job consists primarily of monitoring guests and staff through a peephole.

One day he sees his first wife Thérèse again in this restaurant. She has become the companion of a rich American woman who has only been known as "Empress" since her marriage to a Russian princess. When the Empress dies of an overdose of morphine after a visit to the “Monico” , Thérèse is penniless on the street from one day to the next. Monde tracks her down, and although the previous intimacy of the spouses does not want to return, he helps the morphine addict and gets her drugs. Ultimately, his responsibility to Thérèse forces him to leave Julie and return to Paris with his first wife, in order to enable her to receive medical care from a doctor friend there.

As suddenly as he left his Parisian life three months ago, he is now returning. He doesn't make any statements and, at first glance, nothing seems to have changed. But what has changed is Monsieur Monde, whose life is no longer clouded by shadows. He meets the gaze of all people without any embarrassment or shyness with deep calm and cool serenity.

background

Simenon's biographer Fenton Bresler attributed the serenity and feeling of liberation that Monsieur Monde felt at the end of the novel to Simenon's own situation: the writer, who spent the years of World War II in seclusion in the west of France, had a doctor in the fall of 1940 was misdiagnosed in Fontenay-le-Comte that he suffered from angina pectoris and would only have a year or two to live if he abstained from excessive eating, alcohol and sex. In the months that followed, Simenon turned his full attention to writing his memoir, which was later revised as the Roman Pedigree . It was not until four years later that he received the all-clear from Parisian specialists that he no longer had to live in fear of an early death. The first edition of La fuite de Monsieur Monde began with a dedication to the Paris doctors: “For Professor Lian and Professor Griore and Dr. Eriau in memory of February 1944! "

For Patrick Marnham, too, the novel revealed Simenon's “internal constitution after four years of German occupation and an inadequate emotional life”. Behind Monsieur Monde's flight to the Mediterranean lies Simenon's longing for the island of Porquerolles , which remained inaccessible to him in the divided France of the Vichy regime . The fact that Monsieur Monde “has already reached the steep slope of life” reflects the condition of the author, who is 41 years old at the time of writing. In a letter to André Gide , Simenon described: “After I had finished the novel La fuite de M. Monde towards the end of March of this year , which will appear in three weeks, I had the impression, and I still have it, that a section of mine Life ended and a new one began. ”In fact, the prolific writer Simenon did not write a new book for a whole year after the novel was finished, to which the external circumstances at the end of the war also contributed.

style

Stanley G. Eskin assessed that the language in The Flight of Monsieur Monde is "a lot more artistic and rounded than the 'sparse' style that Simenon otherwise prefers." The novel contains unusually richly pictorial sentences and detailed lake scenes that - similar as in Monsieur Mahé's Holidays - to correspond with an escape from the confines of everyday life. Right at the beginning, Madame Monde is introduced through a series of metaphors in which, for example, her fingers are compared to ebony or the beak of a bird of prey. Franz Schuh , however, emphasized the weaknesses of the “realistic spelling, which, in order to evoke the impression of reality, uses sentences like: 'Herr Ober…! Please bring me a new glass, I dropped a piece of lobster in the wine ... '"

interpretation

Monsieur Monde, whose name translates as “Herr Welt”, was interpreted by many critics as a French everyone or average person . For Charles Taylor, the name resonates equally with clumsy provinciality and bland cosmopolitanism, which Simeon's antihero perfectly outlined. According to Franz Schuh, Monsieur Monde does not want to be “master of the world”, but longs for commonality and an average name. Jacques Dubois saw moons in a series of middle-aged heroes in Simenon's work breaking out of a daily routine. He referred to novels like The Murderer , The Man Who Watched the Trains , The Mayor of Furnes or Malétras takes stock . Anne Richter also saw the novel with its themes of escape into a better future and the journey to oneself as a symbol of Simenon's entire oeuvre.

For Lucille F. Becker, the serenity of the moon arises in the end from the acceptance of his being human. The compassion for his first wife made him realize that you cannot put your past aside. For a while he may live as free and carefree as those people he envied all his life, but in the end he realizes that he must go on with his life. Only after looking himself straight in the eye can he accept his limitations and inadequacies and endure them with serenity in the future. However, the change that has taken place in him cannot be communicated to anyone, because it is based on an experience that every person has to make himself. For Franz Schuh, Monde experiences a moment of enlightenment in which he "sees through his way of being a person, his exertions and slackness, the troubles and excitements and becomes free in relation to them."

Quite different from most of the interpreters, who see a matured and liberated moon at the end of the novel - as also the Diogenes Verlag in the announcement as a "cheerful and conciliatory novel about a new beginning in the middle of life" - finds Monde for Stanley G. Eskin escapes his true identity, but he loses it again when he returns. At the end of the day there is deep resignation in Monde's gaze, whereby Eskin refers to a habit of Simenon to look for signs of unspoken despair in the eyes of his outwardly cheerful friends, for a look just like that of Monsieur Monde.

reception

According to Fenton Bresler, The Escape of Monsieur Monde is one of the most successful and at the same time one of the most characteristic works by Simenon. For John Banville , the motive to escape from the entanglement of life in anonymity was an obsessively recurring theme in Simenon's work, which nowhere has been treated so neatly and convincingly as in The Flight of Monsieur Monde . Patrick Marnham counted the novel among Simenon's best works and he called it "his best novel of the war time". The French author Colette wrote to the author: "I was very moved by the deep sadness of your hero."

Franz Schuh described the fascination of Moon's transformation, but he also highlighted the stylistic weaknesses of Simenon's realism. Newgate Callender criticized the author's impatience in dealing with his hero: "Instead of letting the moons develop instinctively, of course, he pushes them around like a pawn." For Charles Taylor, Simenon's novel is slim, taut and ruthless and he avoids all genre- Conventions that he seems to be heading towards.

The French magazine L'Express ranked La fuite de Monsieur Monde fourth in an ideal bibliography of Georges Simenon's works and described the novel as being inspired by Greek drama in its structure . In 2004, Claude Goretta filmed the novel as a Swiss-French TV production. The title role was played by Bernard Le Coq .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: La fuite de Monsieur Monde . La jeune Parque, Paris 1945 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: The hazelnut bush. The Flight of the Lord Moons. The hand . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1970.
  • Georges Simenon: The Flight of Mr. Moons . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Heyne, Munich 1972.
  • Georges Simenon: The Escape of Monsieur Monde . Translation: Barbara Heller. Diogenes, Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-257-22408-7 .
  • Georges Simenon: The Escape of Monsieur Monde . Selected novels in 50 volumes, volume 23. Translation: Barbara Heller. Diogenes, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-257-24123-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ La fuite de M. Monde in the bibliography of Michel Martina.
  2. ↑ Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , p. 96.
  3. ^ A b Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 266.
  4. ^ Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person . Ernst Kabel, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-921909-93-7 , pp. 206, 228.
  5. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , pp. 283-284, letter p. 291.
  6. ↑ a b c d Franz Schuh : Maigret's world champion . In the time of August 18, 2006.
  7. ^ A b c Fenton Bresler: Georges Simenon. In search of the "naked" person , p. 227.
  8. ^ "The novel's antihero is Norbert Monde, and that name, with its clashing echoes of podgy provincialism and bland cosmopolitanism, sums him up perfectly." In: Charles Taylor: Shadows of late summer  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info : The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / images.salon.com   . In: Salon.com of August 20, 2004.
  9. ↑ Michel Lemoine: La fuit de Monsieur Monde . In: Robert Frickx, Raymond Trousson (eds.): Lettres françaises de Belgique. Dictionnaire of the oeuvre. I. Le roman . Duclout Paris 1988, ISBN 2-8011-0755-7 , p. 209.
  10. ^ Anne Richter: Georges Simenon et l'homme désintégré . La Renaissance du Livre, Brussels 1964, p. 35.
  11. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . Twayne, Boston 1977, ISBN 0-8057-6293-0 , pp. 99-100.
  12. ↑ The Escape of Monsieur Monde ( Memento of the original of February 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the website of Diogenes Verlag.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.diogenes.ch
  13. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography , pp. 266-267.
  14. ↑ "The urge to flee life's embroilments and disappear into anonymity [...] is an obsessively recurring theme in Simenon's work. Nowhere is it worked out more neatly or more persuasively than in Monsieur Monde Vanishes . "In: John Banville : The Escape Artist: John Banville on Georges Simenon . In: LA Weekly of May 28, 2008.
  15. ↑ Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon , pp. 272, 283.
  16. ↑ "Instead of letting Monde evolve naturally, instinctively, he pushes him around like a chess piece." In: Newgate Callender: Monsieur Monde Vanishes . In: The New York Times, May 22, 1977.
  17. ^ "The latest is the 1945 Monsieur Monde Vanishes , which, in the slim Simenon tradition, is taut and ruthlessly economical. Yet it also manages to elude nearly every genre convention it appears headed for. “In: Charles Taylor: Shadows of late summer  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / images.salon.com   . In: Salon.com of August 20, 2004.
  18. ↑ Une bibliothèque idéale . In: L'Express from May 1, 2003.
  19. ↑ La fuite de Monsieur Monde in the Internet Movie Database (English)