“The Death of Auguste”. A Simenon from 1966 in the bookstore

On the same topic:

Adelphi, give us our seasonal Simenon today. Curious how an author so insanely prolific, as Casanova was with love, can never lose his ability to tell the human soul and its flaws. Every time you start a novel (hard or Maigret) you throw yourself into it, like in a familiar river whose path you think you can know but not the ending. And although there is a comforting scheme, and recognizable tics and images (like the large breasts of many female figures, inevitable), each time you are enraptured by the clarity with which you can tell the social dynamics, even the most petty and banal . The Death of Auguste (Adelphi, translated by L. Frausin Guarino) was published in 1966, in the same year he also wrote Le Confessionnal and Maigret and the Nahour Case. A year of normal production for the very organized Simenon who that year, at 63, also wins the great prize of the Mystery Writers of America, yet another sign that his production is seen as "genre", only because there are often cops and murders. But in The Death of Auguste, precisely, he confirms how the demon of literature is blind to the genres and labels that are placed on the shelves of bookstores .

A man, in fact, the old restaurateur Auguste, dies. He suddenly collapses in the dining room while he is working, and the dinner downstairs continues after he is carried to bed. But the Ivan Ilyich phase does not last long, because more than an examination of conscience of the deceased, the interesting dynamic develops between the three brothers, and between their respective wives and girlfriends . Even though Auguste was the son of a laborer who “could neither read nor write”, and who lived in an uncomfortable house near where prostitutes walked, he had built a good business. The restaurant he had opened in Paris, specializing in Auvergne, was frequented by ministers, diplomatic delegations, glamorous women, and had even won two Michelin stars. From a diner for the dockers of the markets of Les Halles – the belly of Paris, as Zola said – Auguste's restaurant is the place to be. But it is not clear what old Auguste did with all that money.

The three sons are very different from each other. One has always been by his side in the management of the restaurant and had been made a partner, even if there are no documents to prove it. Another was ashamed of his father's profession. He is the only one who studied and became a judge, moving to the outskirts of Paris, in those "modern buildings called residences", but some money could have been very useful. The third is a scoundrel who lives by his wits and somewhat shady business deals, a man "who has come to distrust everything" and who arrives by plane from Cannes and without even wanting to see the body asks "where is the money?". In the meantime, the mother, bedridden, seems "immaterial, she had become so thin" and does not recognize anyone. The sisters-in-law get involved, or suffer in silence, judged for their past professions, or behave like arrogant harpies looking for pennies. As always, money, a moral barometer, is only a tool that brings out the characters, the best and the worst, of human beings . “I think the novelist should show man as he is, and not as a man in propaganda,” Simenon told the Paris Review. “And I don’t just mean political propaganda; I mean the kind of man they teach you in the third grade, a man who has nothing to do with the real man.”

More on these topics: