#RivetingReviews: Max Easterman reviews THE WIDOW COUDERC by Georges Simenon

As is the case with many of Georges Simenon’s books, this is a novella rather than a novel, but as is also the case with Simenon, he packs as much into these 178 pages as many other authors would into double that number. His descriptive passages may be spare, but they display a perspicacity and precision, so perfectly rendered in this new translation by Siân Reynolds that we don’t feel the need for more. Simenon was prolific but his was always writing of a high order and here in what has been hailed as his existentialist classic (first published in 1942), it is both profoundly sad and deeply depressing.

Another hallmark of Simenon’s storytelling is that it will take place in the most ordinary of circumstances, in situations that on the surface are devoid of drama or passion; in Couderc it is in the Morvan, north-west of Lyon: a rural, bucolic setting, where the only action seems to be the necessity of going to market, feeding the chickens and opening the lock gates on the canal that runs alongside the river Cher. Tati, the widow of the book’s title, is returning from market in a crowded bus; a nondescript young man, Jean, is walking the same road and tries unsuccessfully to flag down a passing car. He hails the bus instead, though he hasn’t enough money to pay the full fare to the terminus. His eyes and the widow’s meet across the heads of the other women pressed together on the bench seats and Tati almost misses her stop, she is so taken with him. He then gets off the bus shortly after and starts to walk back towards where she lives. He helps carry her loaded shopping bags to her house. So far, so seductively everyday, but we know so little about either of them that when she suggests he stay for bed and board in return for doing work around her farm, we immediately sense from her confident offer – ‘She was taking possession of him … she was determined to make him understand she was not afraid’ – and his diffident acceptance – ‘I might run off with your savings … You’d never find them’ – that this will be no normal relationship. ‘From the first moment in the bus, before they had said anything, they had understood each other.’

As events unfold over a long, hot summer, that understanding comes under increasing pressure. They work together, she explains his tasks, but even as Jean starts to take the initiative around the farm, she issues her instructions with increasing force; she takes him into her bed – but he isn’t the only man to join her there. We learn that he has spent five years in prison, which worries Tati hardly at all; but what does worry her is that he might meet with other members of her family who live nearby – and she desperately takes every opportunity to prevent him from doing so. Her farm and farmhouse were left her by her late husband, whose sisters are equally determined to wrest it from her, legally or otherwise. As Jean is sucked ever closer into the power struggle between Tati and her family, it becomes more and more apparent that another power struggle is developing between him and her. Overlying this is his own internal struggle with his conscience about his prison term: can he admit to her the real truth about what happened? When she is attacked by her brother-in-law and badly injured, Jean becomes her carer and the stage is set for an unavoidable conflict.

Georges Simenon’s storytelling was rarely about uncovering clues as to what has already happened but much more about his fascination with an individual’s psychology and how this drives what will happen; how a series of minor events, actions and reactions, routines, will lead people to do things they themselves – and we – would never have thought them capable of. As one piece of this human jigsaw slots into the next and the next, the final picture is shown to have been predictable, inevitable from the start. The Widow Couderc is a masterful exposé of how two lives meet, intertwine, create their own special dynamic and then break down under their internal contradictions and external stresses. And there is indeed a sense of quiet inexorability about this story: we can hardly guess at the outcome, but as we turn each page, we can feel the tensions building, the frustrations boiling, the guilt festering. Couderc is a paradigm of how to create real passion out of the quotidian humdrum.

‘He has never looked at her so calmly before … He wasn’t smiling … On the contrary, he was sad. Or rather, resigned … he would accept the inevitable.’

Reviewed by Max Easterman

THE WIDOW COUDERC

By Georges Simenon

Translated from the French by Siân Reynolds

Published by Penguin Classics (2023)

September 2023 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

Max Easterman spent thirty-five years as a BBC broadcaster. He was a lecturer in journalism for seventeen years at Huddersfield University and is today a translator, media trainer with Sounds Right, jazz musician and reviewer.

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