Maigret and the lonely man

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Maigret and the lonely man (French: Maigret et l'homme tout seul ) is a crime novel by the Belgian writer Georges Simenon . It is the 73rd novel in a series of 75 novels and 28 stories about the detective inspector Maigret and was written from February 1st to 7th, 1971 in Epalinges . The novel was published by Presses de la Cité in 1971 and preprinted from April 14 to May 21, 1971 in 23 episodes under the title Maigret et l'homme seul in the French daily Le Figaro . The first German translation Maigret und der Einsame by Hansjürgen Wille and Barbara Klau appeared in 1975 in an anthology with Maigret and the informers as well as Maigret and Monsieur Charles by Kiepenheuer & Witsch . In 1990 the Diogenes Verlag published a new translation by Ursula Vogel under the title Maigret and the lonely man .

The focus of the novel is a murdered clochard . The dead man was a reclusive loner with unusually cultivated manners. More than the search for the perpetrator, Maigret is concerned with the question of why the lonely man left his family from one day to the next to live on the street from now on. He reveals events that are twenty years in the past.

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Place du Tertre on Montmartre
La Baule-Escoublac beach (1986)

August 1965 in Paris : a dead Clochard is found in a dilapidated, empty house in the Quartier des Halles . What is striking is the well-groomed appearance of the dead man, whom nobody seems to know better. He did not seek contact with other homeless people and was nicknamed "Aristo" because of his aristocratic demeanor. Maigret received the first clues as to his identity when he had photos of the deceased published. Two women call independently and ask about a scar on the man, only to hang up again immediately. Only one other witness identified the deceased as Marcel Vivien, a former cabinet maker from Montmartre who, twenty years ago, on December 23, 1945, suddenly left his wife and daughter and went into hiding without a trace. These women were the two anonymous callers, but they cannot or do not want to reveal the reasons for Vivien's disappearance in a personal conversation.

Maigret's research reveals that Vivien was seen in Montmartre in the first half of 1946, mostly in the company of a young woman named Nina Lassave. An anonymous phone call gives the inspector a name that puts him on a new track: Mahossier. Maigret tracks down Louis Mahossier, a painter who is on vacation in La Baule . The latter denies any connection to the case, although several witnesses claim to have seen him nearby on the evening of Vivien's death and he has a pistol of the caliber he was looking for. Finally, Maigret's visit to the newspaper archive of the Parisien Libéré unearths a criminal case that could also have been found in the archives of the Paris Criminal Police, but which the young Maigret had not pursued because he had been transferred to Luçon for a year in 1946 : Nina Lassave became strangled in August 1946. The investigation led to the trail of Vivien and Mahossier, who both had an affair with the young woman. But the suspicions against both could not be substantiated, and the case remained unsolved.

In Maigret's final interrogation, both the 20 years ago and the current case are resolved. Vivien, who had given up family and work for Nina Lassave, could not bear that she was also the lover of the young painter Mahossier and murdered her out of jealousy. Because a return to a bourgeois life then seemed no longer possible for him, he led an existence on the margins of society for twenty years. Mahossier, who loved Nina as passionately as Vivien, vowed to avenge her death. Although long married and the head of a prosperous painting business, twenty years after the events he was still trying to track down Vivien, who had gone into hiding. When he recognized this one evening in the shape of a clochard in the Paris market halls, he completed his oath and killed Vivien. After Mahossier is taken away, Maigret and his assistant Torrence have to wash down their dismay with a large beer.

background

Maigret and the Lonely Man is one of the few novels in the series that provides the events with an exact date: The novel takes place in August 1965. Maigret says that he was “soon to be fifty-five”. This suggests a year of birth of 1910. Only two other Maigret novels date their plot with similar precision - and they both lead to a significantly different date of birth. In Maigret and the late Monsieur Gallet , Maigret was 45 years old on June 27, 1930; In Maigret's first investigation on April 15, 1913, the young policeman was 26 years old. Various Maigret researchers have tried to smooth the contradicting information about Maigret's age in the course of the series into chronologies.

An episode from Maigret's biography is subsequently illuminated in Maigret and the Lonely Man . The sentence transfer to Luçon in 1946 refers to a novel that Simenon actually wrote in 1940 and published two years later: Maigret in the Judge's House . A reason for Maigret's transfer, which was not even known to Madame Maigret at the time, is now provided: Maigret was at war with the inspector of the criminal police at that time, whereupon he was transferred to Luçon and was bored in the French provinces for almost a year . Only when the inspector retired did his successor call Maigret back to Paris.

Georges Simenon wrote the novel in February 1971 during a personal crisis. Simenon's mother, with whom he had a difficult relationship throughout his life, died in December 1970. His second wife Denyse suffered from depression and even a nervous breakdown, and their daughter Marie-Jo also worried the father with her psychological instability. She would commit suicide seven years later. With the previous non-Maigret novel La Disparition d'Odile ( The Missing Daughter ), Simenon anticipated his daughter's escape. The following novel, La Cage de verre ( The Glass Cage ), like Maigret et l'homme tout seul, revolved around the subject of loneliness.

interpretation

The figure of the clochard always exerted a particular fascination on Simenon. In Simenon on the couch , the author, who had already written about ending up as a clochard when he was 16, confessed “that I still feel that the state of the clochard is almost ideal. The real Clochard is undoubtedly a much more perfect person than we are. ”Various novels from Simenon's work, including Maigret and the Clochard , deal with the fate of homeless people, who have mostly made a conscious decision, completely with their previous lives and their family ties to break and turn your back on society. In Maigret and the lonely man, according to Murielle Wenger, it is especially the subject of a self-chosen, radical seclusion and loneliness that preoccupied Simenon.

For Lucille F. Becker, the focal point of the novel is the dead person and the question of the life he has led, while the resolution of the case is postponed almost like an epilogue. The history of twenty years ago illustrates Simenon's conviction that in most cases the victim is partly responsible for his murder. The perpetrator, on the other hand, commits the murder because, as in all of Simenon's novels, he cannot do otherwise, cannot oppose the necessity of the act. In this way Maigret's sympathy is distributed among both perpetrators and victims, since he can understand the passion that drove two ordinary people to their deeds.

For Josef Quack, the key to Maigret's investigation is the question of why the perpetrator's hatred of his victim remained alive twenty years after the events of the past. The murderer reports that he waited indecisively for his victim for several hours and finally decided to act when he thought of his former lover Nina and "the little birthmark on her cheek that gave her something so touching". According to Quack , Maigret and the Lonely Man is an exemplary novel for “the narrative weight of seemingly insignificant details”, which for Simenon's characters often gain a life-defining, existential meaning.

reception

Simenon's biographer Stanley. G. Eskin used the example of Maigret and the lonely man to explain the dichotomy of many Maigret novels. Simenon breaks the usual rules of the game of a detective novel that lives from criminalistic puzzles and switches to the level of a psychological novel in the middle of the book. The result, however, is that the novels are often not completely convincing on both levels. In Maigret and the Lonely Man, for example, “the plot failed quite a bit” and a reader interested in the criminal mystery might have to “reread the story in order to understand everything, and who cares about reading a detective story a second time? “The deeper level of the psychological novel, on the other hand, is“ by no means illuminated ”by the detective plot and an interested reader learns too little about Louis, Marcel and the other characters, but too much about Maigret.

For Anatole Broyard , the novel was proof that Simenon “no longer writes good detective novels.” He has “changed. His books are no longer authentic, but intended for tourists who are attracted by the famous name. ”He was particularly bothered by the fact that Maigret did not track down the perpetrator through his usual, almost psychoanalytical method, but rather by chance through a telephone call which is not even explained. “You'd think Maigret would be ashamed. He doesn't deserve his wages. ” Kirkus Reviews, on the other hand, described that the commissioner treated the case with his typical“ savoir faire ”and decency. "A liqueur for dessert, class."

Tilmann Spreckelsen was satisfied with the plot in his Maigret marathon : “How all this leads to a catastrophe after six months, triggered a quake that continues into the present day of the novel (twenty years later), that is indeed constructed, but Very nicely constructed. ”And Ingrid Müller-Münch even called Maigret and the lonely man one of“ Simenon's stories from the heart ”, which, like the entire Maigret series,“ track down life stories that are laconically told and are nothing special in themselves. Except for one thing: that at some point they got out of hand and that this excursus could no longer be repaired. "

The novel was twice as part of TV series about the Commissioner Maigret filmed . The main roles were played by Kinya Aikawa (Japan, 1978) and Jean Richard (France, 1982).

expenditure

  • Georges Simenon: Maigret et l'homme tout seul . Presses de la Cité, Paris 1971 (first edition).
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the spy . Maigret and the lonely. Maigret and Monsieur Charles . Translation: Hansjürgen Wille, Barbara Klau. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1975, ISBN 3-462-01039-5 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lonely man . Translation: Ursula Vogel. Diogenes, Zurich 1990. ISBN 3-257-21804-4 .
  • Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lonely man . All Maigret novels in 75 volumes, volume 73. Translation: Ursula Vogel. Diogenes, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23873-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographie de Georges Simenon 1968 à 1989 on Toutesimenon.com, the website of the Omnibus Verlag.
  2. ↑ Maigret et l'homme tout seul in the Simenon bibliography by Yves Martina.
  3. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lonely man . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, pp. 5, 7.
  4. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lonely man . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, p. 50.
  5. ↑ a b c Maigret of the Month: Maigret et l'homme tout seul (Maigret and the Loner) on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.
  6. ^ Jean Forest's Chronology of the ages of Maigret and Simenon .
  7. ^ David F. Drake: The Chronology of Maigret's Life and Career .
  8. ^ Maigret Biography from the work of Jacques Baudou .
  9. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 21: In the judge's house . On FAZ.net from August 31, 2008.
  10. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lonely man . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, p. 159.
  11. ^ Georges Simenon: Simenon on the couch . Diogenes, Zurich 1985, ISBN 3-257-21658-0 , p. 17.
  12. ↑ Lucille F. Becker: Georges Simenon . Twayne, Boston 1977, ISBN 0-8057-6293-0 , pp. 40-41.
  13. ↑ Georges Simenon: Maigret and the lonely man . Diogenes, Zurich 2009, p. 195.
  14. ↑ Josef Quack: The limits of the human. About Georges Simenon, Rex Stout, Friedrich Glauser, Graham Greene . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-2014-6 , p. 18.
  15. ^ Stanley G. Eskin: Simenon. A biography . Diogenes, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-257-01830-4 , pp. 411-412.
  16. ↑ Anatole Broyard : “Georges Simenon no longer writes good mysteries. [...] Mr. Simenon has changed. His books are no longer authentic, but designed for the tourist who is attracted by a famous name. […] You would think Maigret would be ashamed. He is not earning his keep. “ Ou Est le Simenon d'Antan? In: The New York Times, March 11, 1975.
  17. ↑ "Maigret handles it with typical savoir faire and civility [...] An after-dinner cordial, neat." Maigret and the Loner . In: Kirkus Reviews .
  18. ^ Tilman Spreckelsen: Maigret Marathon 73: The lonely man . On FAZ.net from October 2, 2009.
  19. ^ The telephone murder (s) counseling . Literature list for the broadcast of WDR 5 on October 31, 2009 (pdf).
  20. ↑ Maigret Films & TV on Steve Trussel's Maigret page.