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  Simenon’s Island of Bad Dreams John Banville In Georges Simenon’s  The Mahé Circle , translated now into English for the first time, François Mahé is suffering from a sense of general dissatisfaction. June 1, 2015 Mondadori/Getty Georges Simenon, 1966 In  Monsieur Monde Vanishes , one of the finest of what Simenon called his  romans durs , or “hard” novels, the eponymous central character, a successful, middle-aged Parisian businessman, simply walks out of his life one day, without a word to anyone, including his wife and family. He takes a train to Marseilles and checks into an anonymous hotel, and next morning wakes from a dream in which he seemed to be weeping copiously and talking to himself: He was speaking without moving his lips, for which he had no need. He was telling of his infinite aching weariness, which was due not to his journey in a train but to his long journey as a man. He was ageless now. He could let his lips quiver like a child’s. “Always, for a...

  Heart of Darkness Norman Rush August 11, 2005 issue George Simenon; drawing by David Levine Buy Print Tropic Moon  ( Coup de lune )  is the first of Georges Simenon’s novels to be set outside Europe, and it is also among the first and best of his serious novels, those he called  romans durs  in order to distinguish them from the hundreds of genre fictions he produced, the  romans populaires  that were making him rich and world famous, including his psychological crime thrillers and the titles in the Inspec-tor Maigret series. It is a remarkable work, in which Simenon’s characters deliver a brutal and clueless enactment of interwar French imperialism at its most naked—in Gabon, French Equatorial Africa, in the capital, Libreville, and upcountry. As a revelation of the institutionalized squalor the French Empire amounted to, it stands high, ranking with L.F. Céline’s depiction of life in another part of the same empire, Cameroon, in his  Voyage au...

  GEORG LUKACS AND HIS DEVIL'S PACT In the twentieth century it is not easy for an honest man to be a literary critic. There are so many more urgent things to be done. Criticism is an adjunct. For the art of the critic consists in bringing works of literature to the attention of precisely those readers who may least require such help; does a man read critiques of poetry or drama or fiction unless he is already highly literate on his own? On either hand, moreover, stand two tempters. To the right, Literary History, with its solid air and academic credentials. To the left, Book Reviewing—not really an art, but rather a technique committed to the implausible theory that something worth reading is published each morning in the year. Even the best of criticism may succumb to either temptation. Anxious to achieve intellectual respectability, the firm stance of the scholar, the critic may, like Sainte-Beuve, almost become a literary historian. Or he may yield to the claims of the novel an...