The green shutters

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The green shutters (French original title: Les volets verts ) is a novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon , which was written from January 16 to 27, 1950 in Carmel-by-the-Sea , and published in September of the same year by the Paris publisher Presses de la Cité was published. The German translation by Alfred Günther was published in 1953 by the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt .

The "great Maugin" is a well-known and successful French actor who has worked his way up from a small background. A few days before his 60th birthday, a doctor's diagnosis throws him off track.

content

At the age of 59, Émile Maugin, known as "the great Maugin", reached the peak of his career. Raised in the Vendée and coming from a poor background - his father was an alcoholic, his mother an occasional prostitute - he worked his way up over the years at variety shows and fairs and is now a celebrated film and stage star. After two divorces - the first wife, an aging grande dame of French theater, gave her young protégé her first theater roles, the second, a South American beauty who had numerous lovers next to him - he has his great love in Alice, who is only 22 years old found. But she also cheats, her daughter is not his, he meets her lover for the first time in a restaurant. His biological son Emile Cadot, on the other hand, the child of an extramarital affair, does not get his life in order and regularly begs his father for money. He is just one of the numerous petitioners who besiege the famous actor's wardrobe every day and who hope for help and support from him.

The diagnosis of a doctor who certifies that the 59-year-old has the worn heart of a 75-year-old and only gives him a few more years if he is spared, throws Maugin off track. For the first time he feels how worn out and tired he is at the end of his exhausting life. From his current contracts, he flees from all obligations to the Côte d'Azur to relax while fishing. But even here he does not come to himself, only new requirements replace the old ones, which he feels even less equal to. He also gets an infection when he is stepped on a fish hook that cannot be treated because of his weak heart. He travels back to Paris , where he meets two childhood friends who, unlike him, never made the leap out of unsuccessfulness and are now vegetating as clochards . The following night with a prostitute, Maugin collapses and is only delirious when he is brought to the hospital by his worried secretary Adrien Jouve. In agony he fantasizes in a court hearing in which his guilt is judged. He realizes that his life has consisted of one thing above all else: escape. It seems to be within reach of what he has fled from and what he has always been looking for, but he is no longer able to say it. When his heart stopped, he confessed his guilt to the nurse: he went to bed. The news of his death is already emblazoned on the titles of the newspapers.

interpretation

In the novel, green shutters become a symbol of a domestic idyll.

According to Lucille F. Becker, the topic of illness as a triggering moment for self-awareness is not a rare subject in literature. It refers, for example, to The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann , but never before has the nullity of human existence been presented with such unbearable rigor as in The Green Shutters . The novel combines many of the main themes from Simenon's work: the psychological imprints from childhood, feelings of guilt that arise from betraying one's own ideals, loneliness, exile, alcohol, the futility of flight and the body as an expression of the sick soul. Using Maugin's example, Simenon demonstrates that the energy and enthusiasm with which you hunt it does not depend on the goal, but only on the way there. After Maugin has achieved his goal, he only discovers that it is nothing. His feelings of guilt and alienation are typical of Simenon's protagonists. They illustrated Camus ' thesis that no one is ever wholly guilty or innocent, and they go hand in hand with Maigret's refusal to convict a perpetrator for his actions.

Franz Schuh described the novel as “a masterpiece that tells of how someone comes to terms with their life”, in the sense of bringing it to an end. The protagonist is "a person who is not at home inside [;] he does not want to be where he has to be." By Simenon's description, justice is done to the actually unsympathetic figure and he turns out to be a person who only tries to cope with his life. The eponymous green shutters, which in the novel are the expression of a longing for an idyllic home, which Maugin's first wife dreams of first, and later Maugin himself, Schuh called "the philistine's blue flower ". The importance they had for their author became apparent a few months after the novel was written, when Simenon acquired the so-called Shadow Rock Farm in Lakeville , Connecticut , where he would live for the next five years: an old white wooden house with green Shutters.

background

The green shutters was often referred to as roman à clef about the French actor Raimu read, who died 1946th Simenon always resisted this reading, especially since he had been friends with Raimu. In his private life, he described the character Émile Maugin as an amalgam of various actors, including Harry Baur , Michel Simon , Charlie Chaplin and above all WC Fields . In order to counter the rumors, however, he wrote a preliminary remark in which he distanced his character from all these role models. He also rejected connections in his own biography to that of Maugin, claiming that apart from the medical examination at the beginning of the novel, there were only disturbing coincidences between himself and his character.

In fact, in 1940, when Simenon was living in the Vendée during the occupation of France , he himself received a doctor's diagnosis that his heart was exhausted and that he would only have a few years to live with strict abstinence. Under the impression of this diagnosis, he spent the following months in agony and wrote down his memoirs. It was not until 1944 that it was exposed as a misdiagnosis by Parisian specialists. Simenon himself said that the passage in the novel was hardly fictional and corresponded to his experience at the time. However, there are a number of other parallels between the character and the author. The actor's affair with his maid is reminiscent of Simenon's own relationship with his maid Boule, which then also counted The Green Shutters among her favorite Simenon books. Numerous locations are mentioned that played an important role in Simenon's relationship with his first wife Tigy, such as the Boulevard des Batignolles, the Place Constantin-Pecqueur or the Fouquet's. Other similarities range from excessive alcohol consumption and attacks of jealousy to a boat called "Girelle". Last but not least, Stanley G. Eskin also sees a parallel between Maugin's feeling of disillusionment in the midst of public success and Simenon's own life situation, so that he judged: “With Maugin, he created a complex figure with strengths and weaknesses, which to a great extent the contradictions of his own Personality corresponded. "

reception

Simenon regarded the novel, which was written in a phase of euphoria and intensive writing work after the birth of his second son in America, as a major work in his oeuvre. He described it as "perhaps the book that critics have long asked me to do and that I have always hoped to write one day". Many critics still agree with this assessment to this day. The book's admirers included Simenon's former publisher Gaston Gallimard and the writer Henry Miller , who, after reading the novel and letter to my judge, valued Simenon's importance far higher than his reputation. Simenon's biographer Patrick Marnham considers it one of the author's best novels, as does his colleague Lucille F. Becker. The science fiction author Andreas Eschbach selected the novel for an anthology about authors and their teachers and used his example to explain how Simenon created his novels from the characters and entire scenes from individual details.

Charles J. Rolo, the New York Times critic , admitted that he did not understand the novel and its hero's misfortune. Nevertheless, he recognized Balzacian qualities in the strength and precision of the novel, its brutal humor and its passionate humanity . The main character has "a tragic dignity and strength". Kirkus Reviews found in the novel "a precise dissection, both medical and emotional-pathological, which is more obscured by the ghosts of death and despair than by the usual murderous theme." According to Peter Kaiser, the account that the dying man gives to himself is " as relentless and combative as Maugin's life and - the heartbreaking thing Simenon has ever written. "

A radio play adaptation for SWF and WDR was created in 1964 under the direction of Gert Westphal . Gustav Knuth spoke to Emile Maugin. In 1988 Milan Dor and Milo Dor filmed Les volets verts as an Austro-French TV film as part of the L'heure Simenon series . Armin Mueller-Stahl played the role of Emil .

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Les volets verts. Presses de la Cité, Paris 1950 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: The green shutters. Translation: Alfred Günther. German publishing company, Stuttgart 1953.
  • Georges Simenon: The green shutters. Translation: Alfred Günther. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1964.
  • Georges Simenon: The green shutters. Translation: Alfred Günther. Heyne, Munich 1975, ISBN 3-453-12101-5 .
  • Georges Simenon: The green shutters. Translation: Alfred Günther. Diogenes, Zurich 1977, ISBN 3-257-20373-X (first unabridged edition).
  • Georges Simenon: The green shutters. Selected novels in 50 volumes, volume 28. Translation: Alfred Günther. Diogenes, Zurich 2012, ISBN 978-3-257-24128-0 .

literature

  • Andreas Eschbach : To the goal without a plan. In: Olaf Kutzmutz, Stephan Porombka: Read first. Then write. 22 authors and their teachers. Luchterhand, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-630-62115-9 , pp. 119–129.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Biographie de Georges Simenon 1946 à 1967 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of Omnibus Verlag.
  2. Les volets verts in Yves Martina's bibliography.
  3. Oliver Hahn: Bibliography of German-language editions . Georges-Simenon-Gesellschaft (Ed.): Simenon-Jahrbuch 2003 . Wehrhahn, Laatzen 2004, ISBN 3-86525-101-3 , pp. 99-100.
  4. Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon. House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , pp. 72, 74-75.
  5. Franz Schuh : Death of an Actor . In: Die Zeit of March 14, 2002.
  6. Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 335.
  7. ^ Pierre Assouline : Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , pp. 256-257.
  8. ^ Pierre Assouline: Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , pp. 186-187.
  9. Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 222.
  10. ^ Pierre Assouline: Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 366.
  11. a b Patrick Marnham: The man who was not Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 332.
  12. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , p. 303.
  13. ^ Pierre Assouline: Simenon. A biography . Chatto & Windus, London 1997, ISBN 0-7011-3727-4 , p. 249.
  14. Patrick Marnham: The Man Who Wasn't Maigret. The life of Georges Simenon . Knaus, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-8135-2208-3 , p. 340.
  15. Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon. House, London 2006, ISBN 1-904950-34-5 , p. 72.
  16. Andreas Eschbach: Without a plan to the goal. In: Olaf Kutzmutz, Stephan Porombka: Read first. Then write. 22 authors and their teachers. Luchterhand, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-630-62115-9 , pp. 119–129.
  17. ^ "A tragic dignity and strength" Quoted from: Charles J. Rolo: Guilty - But Why? . In: The New York Times, January 24, 1951.
  18. "A dissection that is precise in both medical and emotional pathology, this is overlaid with the specter of death and despair rather than the previous theme of murder." Quoted from: The Heart of a Man by Georges Simenon . In: Kirkus Reviews of June 25, 1951.
  19. Peter Kaiser: The Great Maugin ( 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.
  20. The green shutters in the HörDat audio game database .
  21. Les volets verts in the Internet Movie Database (English)