How far do men and women’s memories about their ancestors stretch back? Usually just three generations and true death sets in when nobody remembers a deceased person anymore. Simenon wrote this family history in letter form in 1957. The purported writer is Alain (48), a reserved actuarial statistician and key staffer of a giant insurance company, the intended recipient and reader his son Jean-Paul (16). His long letter has a meandering quality full of hesitation and self doubt, but also deftly sketches a detailed outline of his own and his wife’s, Jean-Paul’s mother’s, family’s histories. Alain questions his own motives throughout this self-imposed ordeal and finds it hard to decide when his son should read the letter once it is completed. How would he react aged only 16? Would annexing the letter to his testament not come too late in life for him? The year 1928 is regarded as disastrous by father Alain, then 18 and his family and the year recurs time and again, casting shadows on many aspects of recent family history. Alain knows his son suspects something in the family has gone terribly wrong and pushes his account of the fatal and destructive events of 1928 forward towards the final pages. Stunning, rich, perfectly-written and -composed novel full of bourgeois conformity and ambiguity, coldness, passion and sacrifice.
Author
Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903 – 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret. Although he never resided in Belgium after 1922, he remained a Belgian citizen throughout his life. Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, capable of writing 60 to 80 pages per day. His oeuvre includes nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms. Altogether, about 550 million copies of his works have been printed. He is best known, however, for his 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Maigret. The first novel in the series, Pietr-le-Letton, appeared in 1931; the last one, Maigret et M. Charles, was published in 1972. The Maigret novels were translated into all major languages and several of them were turned into films and radio plays. Two television series (1960-63 and 1992-93) have been made in Great Britain. During his "American" period, Simenon reached the height of his creative powers, and several novels of those years were inspired by the context in which they were written (Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946), Maigret à New York (1947), Maigret se fâche (1947)). Simenon also wrote a large number of "psychological novels", such as La neige était sale (1948) or Le fils (1957), as well as several autobiographical works, in particular Je me souviens (1945), Pedigree (1948), Mémoires intimes (1981). In 1966, Simenon was given the MWA's highest honor, the Grand Master Award. In 2005 he was nominated for the title of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian). In the Flemish version he ended 77th place. In the Walloon version he ended 10th place.
