"L'homme Qui Regardait Passer les Trains" by Georges Simenon (1936); in English: "The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By," Pan Books, London, 1948 (out of print). Translated from the French into Hebrew by Yehoshua Kenaz, as "Ha'ish Shetsafa Berakavot," Am Oved, 2001, 363 pages.
After more than 60 years, a wonderful new translation has been published of "L'homme Qui Regardait Passer les Trains," the breathtaking, dark, dense, disturbing, funny novel by Belgian writer Georges Simenon - the all-time genius of the detective novel - and justice has been done to readers of Hebrew who until now have known almost nothing of the approximately 200 novels Simenon wrote.
"The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By," which tells of a Dutchman from Groningen, Kees Popinga, who at the age of 42 suddenly abandons his orderly life, was indeed published in Hebrew decades ago by the Mizrahi Press. This book had a soft red cover adorned with a sensational picture of a curvaceous woman in a very tight dress, and in Hebrew it was titled "Express Lagardom" ("Express to the Gallows").
The novel "La Neige Tait Sale" came out in Hebrew as "Hasheleg Haya Shahor" (available in English audiocassette as "The Snow Was Black"), but this tiny inventory of Simenon did not make his works a presence in the consciousness of readers in Israel. There are few Israelis who are truly familiar with the character of Inspector Maigret, the wise, humane, astute and pessimistic detective who inspired the characters of scores of detective investigators in world literature during the 20th century. The spare, razor-sharp realism that characterized Simenon's style from the outset of his career (his first book in the Maigret series was published in 1931, after he moved to Paris from his birthplace, Liege) is also unfamiliar to Hebrew readers. So is the complex and profound psychological characterization of Simenon's characters, the likes of which can perhaps be found (in detail and more expansively) only in Dostoyevsky's novels.
Simenon's works are divided into two categories: He himself distinguished between the Maigret books - his 72 classic detective novels - and what he called his "non-Maigrets," or "novel-novels" or "hard novels." (Over 110 of these books were published during his lifetime, up until 1972. After that, he devoted his life to recording his memoirs, which he did energetically and courageously until his death in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1989.) The novels bound in the book translated by Yehoshua Kenaz (a masterpiece of a translation that has at long last done justice to Simenon's limpid style) are of the second sort: "The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By" and "The Little Man from Archangel" in which the author sets out the lives, the thoughts and the twists and turns of the souls of "ordinary" or "little" people. These are people whom nobody noticed - people who live in a small town in France or a remote village - until the moment they commit some terrible act (usually a murder), or are suspected of committing one.
The essential difference between these novels and Simenon's classic detective novels is the possibility of entering into the criminal's consciousness. In the "hard novels," Simenon overcame the inherent limitation of the detective genre: In all detective novels, even those Simenon wrote, the narrative point of view is limited to that of the investigating detective, and there is almost no full, direct and frank entry into the mind of the murderer. In the novels that are not detective stories, even if they are built around a murder plot (or a suspected murder), Simenon displayed with full force - though with his characteristic restraint and concision, and with unparalleled virtuosity - his way of looking at human beings trapped within themselves, prisoners of their own small fates and accumulating, continual frustration; or stricken with terrible, even if human, covetousness; or flooded with abysmal jealousy that drives them mad, sometimes out of a sense of inferiority or prolonged insult. These forces, which one day burst, like a kind of abscess, into a terrible deed or a series of deeds, lead to the total destruction of the characters, but also redeem them from their accumulating distress, which is almost insufferable. Simenon captures the distress that characterizes the lives of "little" people.
To the outside observer, Kees Popinga, the hero of "The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By," a clerk in Julius de Koster's shipping company, is one of the most boring people in the world. His little life, his regular habits, his ever-so-respectable petite bourgeoise wife (at the beginning of the novel Popinga thinks of her, like the stove and the cigar he smokes, as "as a wife of the best quality there is in Holland") his daughter, whose big eyes are expressionless and his obedient son look as if there is nothing to be said about them and have nothing of interest inside them. Popinga is a little man, bourgeois in his soul, materialist, fairly stupid and fond of chess who lives, like many bourgeois, by the fulfillment of the expectations of a respectable man.
But Simenon knows that there is no person about whom there is nothing to say. Very close observation, observation with a sensitive, wise, precise and entirely nonjudgmental eye into the soul of any human being, even the most boring, can elicit entire worlds - dark and surprising in their humanity. On the first page of the novel, Simenon's narrator reveals "the profound, almost embarrassing excitement" Popinga feels when he sees a moving train, "especially a night train, with its shades drawn to conceal the passengers' secrets." This secret of the petit bourgeois Dutchman is the novel's major symbol: The night the readers make his acquaintance is the night on which his life will be overturned, to become a long journey on a night train and other trains. This journey - which takes place both in reality and metaphorically - is the result of the long-standing misery and insult that nest in the souls of millions of respectable people, arising from the need to zealously maintain the regular routines of their existence, the grasp of the familiar and the known, only because of their pursuit of security and the constant wish to satisfy others.
On that night, when Kees Popinga discovers, almost purely by chance, the sins of his boss, Julius de Koster, the morality that had bound his life bursts, and he allows himself a freedom of which he had never even dreamed. His boss' confession reveals to Popinga the meaninglessness of his obedience and his loyalty to his family, his employers and his community. From here on, he commits a series of terrible deeds and gradually comes to understand that everything that could have connected him to the other people in his life is over, that he is "alone against the whole world." And even though Kees Popinga is not a "nice" person and Simenon reveals his main character's basest intentions, his despicable motives, and his indelible wretchedness (even when he becomes a murderer without a conscience he cannot let go of his concerns about whether other people respect him), anyone who reads about him cannot help but be moved by his humanity. In setting forth Popinga's consciousness and innermost soul, Simenon succeeded as no other writer has in solving the riddle of the personality of one who seems like a psychopath - making him a person whose motives readers can understand, and sometimes even pity.
Jonas Milk, the hero of "The Little Man from Archangel," is Popinga's diametric opposite. This is the story of a man of about 40 who lives in a small town in France. His wife, 20 years younger than he, does not come home after looking after a neighbor's baby, and the novel deals with what happens to her husband because of her disappearance.
The opening sentence of the novel presents the way Jonas Milk feels after he has said something that is untrue - he himself does not know why - about his wife's disappearance. To a neighbor who asks about her, he says that she has gone to visit a girlfriend of hers in another city, and he repeats this lie several times to residents of the neighborhood, each time getting more tangled up in it and despairing of himself for repeating a lie that has no purpose or reason he can understand.
Jonas Milk's lie is more comprehensible to the reader than it is to himself. It is the result of shame and fear, and also of a strong, though repressed, sense of guilt, because of which Jonas feels as if he is indeed solely responsible for the behavior of his young wife, who was more or less sold to him in marriage by her mother. The reader wavers between two poles: Sometimes he totally understands the shame that has motivated the character to lie, and at moments, like everyone around Jonas, he suspects that perhaps this introspective and alarmed man has murdered his wife and butchered her corpse and is pretending that he does not know where she is.
The story of Jonas Milk, a lonely, shy, closed individual, a bookseller in a small French town whose main hobby is collecting stamps (his surprising origins and the complicated events of his childhood and youth are described only in the second half of the novel) is a story of an outsider whose whole life is a desperate attempt to be accepted in a suspicious and closed society. It is Jonas Milk's tentativeness, his hesitancy and lack of daring, his small, regular habits, that make him a victim. This character, through whom Simenon exemplified the ways in which a person's anxieties and guilt feelings fulfill themselves, is one of the most heartbreaking characters in 20th century European literature.
Both of these novels build suspense, distress and impotence that are sometimes difficult to bear. Alienation, strangeness and guilt are what cause Jonas to cling to his shop, his apartment, his regular eating habits and even his wife - who is known in the town as a hot-blooded girl who strays - in an attempt to satisfy his surroundings. This attempt does not work out well, both because most of the town's citizens are very simple people, suspicious and unimaginative, who retreat into familiar ways of thinking. They are unable to understand anything that demands original thought, and because Jonas, in all kinds of roundabout ways (contrary to his intentions, but he cannot control his feelings and actions that derive from them) feeds their versions of his wife's disappearance.
Although these two novels offer but a small sample of Simenon's works, they demonstrate the fullness of a world that no one has ever touched the way he did. It is hard to think of another realistic writer who has succeeded as well as Georges Simenon in bringing to the surface, with such precision and brilliant restraint, the psychological depths of lives that appears to be respectable and "ordinary," and in drawing them as a kind of a map of the human soul.
