Marie from the harbor

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Marie vom Hafen (French: La Marie du port ) is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It was written in October 1937 in Port-en-Bessin , Calvados and was published in the following year by Éditions Gallimard after a preliminary publication in the daily Le Jour from January 15 to February 6, 1938. The first German translation by Ursula Vogel was published in 1989 by Diogenes Publisher . A new translation by Claudia Kalscheuer was published by Hoffmann und Campe in 2019 . In 1949, Marcel Carné filmed the novel with Jean Gabin in the lead role.

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View of today's Port-en-Bessin-Huppain

Her father's death makes the 17-year-old Marie Le Flem from the small fishing village of Port-en-Bessin, Normandy for orphan . While her younger siblings are distributed among the family and the older sister Odile lives with her lover in the nearby town of Cherbourg , for which she is known as a fallen girl, Marie has plans of her own for her life. The girl, who has always been nicknamed "Heimlichtuerin" because she does not reveal her thoughts to anyone, remains alone in Port, where she works in the Café de la Marine and is responsible for her coming of age.

At her father's funeral, Marie first meets Henri Chatelard, 35-year-old lover Odiles who runs a café and a cinema in Cherbourg. The brittle girl exerts a strange fascination on the man who is twice her age and who, with his direct and arrogant demeanor, does not make friends in the small fishing village. On the same day he buys the Jeanne , the accident-damaged boat of the unfortunate fisherman Viau, without really knowing what to do with his new property. However, the boat in need of repair gives him the welcome opportunity to return to Port in the following days and to look for Marie's vicinity. The girl coolly rejects his advances, but with secret joy. From a distance, Viau's 17-year-old son Marcel, who was once friends with Marie, jealously watches their goings-on. After an argument with his father, the boy, who feels unloved by everyone, tears away from home, lies in wait for Chatelard and shoots at his car. He overpowers his attacker, breaks his arm and takes Marcel to Cherbourg to entrust him with medical treatment and the care of Odile.

Chatelard tries in vain to get the dismissive Marie out of his head. Under a pretext, he lures her to Cherbourg, where he manages to be alone with the girl by sending Odile to her patient. But while he only negotiates another rebuff from Marie, he surprises Odile and Marcel in a precarious situation. Finally, Marie sends a message through Odile that she will never leave her home village, but will one day marry a fisherman from Port, who is building one of the most beautiful houses in town for her. While Odile thinks her sister is talking about a lover in Port, Chatelard gets the message. He gives up the café and cinema in Cherbourg and returns to Port to lead Jeanne to her destination as a fishing boat. Now he has finally won the heart of Marie, who stands on the quay and waves as the new fisherman sets off on his first voyage.

Position in Simenon's work

In the epilogue to the novel from the winter of 1938, Simenon described that he had tried since his beginnings as a writer to "trace the human truth, beyond all psychology, which is nothing more than the official version of the truth." His goal is a “reunification of the spiritual and sensual spheres”. Without having achieved the goal so far, while writing Die Marie vom Hafen he became aware of “a slight approximation”, “a spark, a glimmer of hope”. As a writer, one should rate him “after Marie and after the White Horse ” in the sense of a promise to be kept in the future.

According to Simenon's biographer Stanley G. Eskin, Simenon hoped the novel would usher in "a new stage in his development," with which he wanted to leave the production of "silly" or merely "alimenting" literature behind. Regarding La Marie du port , he wrote: "It is the only novel that I have succeeded in in a completely objective style." For Eskin, however, the novel was "by no means a blatant transition to a perfect style or level", although he was was one of Simenon's better ones. Rather, he referred to the biographical background of the novel that Simenon had written on the scene in Port-en-Bessin, when he had temporarily escaped social life in Paris , “to deal with the rough fellows of the small Breton port [...] in the To measure arm wrestling. "

reception

According to Stanley G. Eskin, La Marie du port received "considerable attention" when it appeared and was "widely praised" in the press. André Thérive discussed the novel in Le Temps with Le suspect and came to the conclusion: “If this novel had been published by an unknown author, everyone would scream 'masterpiece'!” Simenon was “a great novelist every year” and owned an “inherent talent, one of the most unusual that has come to light in France.” André Gide said of the novel: “Excellent in every respect. Nothing is missing. One of the best. ”But he also criticized some of Simenon's stylistic quirks, such as the numerous rhetorical questions .

The Hessische Allgemeine described: “From the first to the last page an intense, hypnotizing arc of tension builds up, which does not allow you to put the book aside. Even though a shot is fired, the novel is not a thriller. ”Stanley G. Eskin classified the“ courtship story ”rather as a“ comic novel ”with“ some wonderful little scenes ”. For Peter Kaiser too, Marie von Hafen was Simenon's “funniest novel” and at the same time a “study of the power of love” with “one of the strongest female characters in Simenon's novels”. Alfred Ohswald spoke of "Simenon's version of ' unruly taming '". According to Hans-Jost Weyandt, Simenon refrained from any literary trick: “[T] his narrative tenacity corresponds to the reluctance of the title character against any attempt at appropriation or conquest.” Simenon portrays “a dying breed of people who are resistant to every modern intervention, including the one of the narrator. "

In 1950, Marcel Carné filmed the novel under the title La Marie du Port (German Die Marie vom Hafen ) with Jean Gabin , Blanchette Brunoy , Nicole Courcel , Claude Romain and Louis Seigner .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: La Marie du port . Gallimard, Paris 1938 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Marie from the port . Translation: Ursula Vogel. Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-21683-1 .
  • Georges Simenon: Marie from the port . Selected novels in 50 volumes, volume 12. Translation: Ursula Vogel. Diogenes, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-257-24112-9 .
  • Georges Simenon: Marie from the port . Translation: Claudia Kalscheuer. With an afterword by Christian Seiler. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-455-00518-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1924 à 1945 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of the Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ La Marie du Port 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. 105.
  4. ↑ Georges Simenon: Marie from the port . Diogenes, Zurich 2011, pp. 173–174.
  5. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 222-223.
  6. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. Eine Biographie , pp. 222-224, 236.
  7. ↑ "Excellent in all respects. Nothing lacking. One of the best. ”Quoted from: Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 262.
  8. ↑ Marie vom Hafen ( Memento of the original from April 13, 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
  9. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography , p. 223.
  10. ↑ Peter Kaiser: Die Heimlichtuerin ( Memento of the original from March 4, 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.
  11. ↑ Georges Simenon: Marie from the harbor on buchkritik.at.
  12. ↑ Novel of the Month: White Stand, Dark Souls on Spiegel-Online from August 10, 2011.
  13. ↑ The Marie from the port in the Internet Movie Database (English)