The Flemish House by Georges Simenon

Ho-hum Maigret mystery

The Flemish House, first published in 1932, is the 14th book in Georges Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret detective novels. Though the most recent paperback edition from Penguin Books is called The Flemish House, all previous editions were titled The Flemish Shop. The original French title is Chez les Flamands.

Maigret is invited to look into a case in Givet, a town on the border between France and Belgium, along the Meuse River. A friend of a friend, Anna Peeters, asks Maigret to help clear her family name. A young woman named Germaine Piedboeuf has gone missing. It is known that she has an illegitimate child by Anna’s brother Joseph, who is engaged to marry another woman. The locals feel that the Peeters family killed Germaine to get rid of her and any claims she may have on Joseph. Anna Peeters argues that there is no hard evidence connecting her family to the woman’s disappearance. They are merely the victims of prejudice based on nationality and class.

In this border town, animosity and resentment exist between the French and Flemish residents, which, here on the French side of the border, amplifies the locals’ dislike of the Peeters family. The Peeterses run a successful grocery store/bar serving mostly Flemish customers, and as a result they are relatively well-to-do, financially. The Piedboeufs, on the other hand, are a family of working-class factory employees, so Joseph Peeters’s seduction of Germaine leaves a bad taste of the rich man exploiting the poor girl. All this fuel added to the fire contributes to Anna Peeters turning to Maigret for help in clearing this matter up.

Beyond the mystery, these Maigret novels are often enjoyable for what Simenon shows us of French life of the time period in question. The River Meuse is a thoroughfare for barge traffic, and Givet one of its more popular stops, so Simenon once again gives some glimpses into the lives of the bargemen and families who ply this trade. Canal life is also covered in Lock 14, Maigret and the Headless Corpse, and Maigret and the Bum. In The Flemish House, the Meuse is “in spate,” with high flooding and strong currents that have halted any boat traffic and left the barges stranded along the riverbanks. The depiction of Givet is similar to that of other provincial towns in Maigret novels (The Grand Banks Café, for example). The majority of the residents are shown as close-minded conspiracy theorists. The Belgian border adds a touch of uniqueness to this novel, as the reader gets an inkling of insight into Flemish culture through the daily lives of the Peeters family in their home and shop.

Upon finishing the book, I really have no idea how Maigret solved this case. He just kind of hangs out with the suspects until he gets a feel for them. There’s no case-cracking clue that tips the scales in his favor. The reader can make an educated guess as to who may have committed the crime, and in the end it seems like that’s just what Maigret does. The solution is neither obvious nor surprising. When the perpetrator is revealed, the reader just feels apathy. Habitual readers of Maigret novels know that the inspector always solves his case, but he doesn’t always subject the culprits to the full extent of legal justice. Sometimes he makes a moral judgment that the crime was justified or committed under extenuating circumstances, and he cuts the criminal a break. In this case, however, it is difficult to understand why Maigret would exercise leniency to the extent that he does. The Flemish House failed to capture my attention the way most Maigret mysteries do. This is just an average mystery novel, and a below-average book for Simenon.

The Metropolis by Upton Sinclair

Lifestyles of the rich and stupid

The Metropolis, a novel by Upton Sinclair, was published in 1908, just a couple years after his controversial breakthrough book The Jungle. The two novels are written in a similar muckraking, pro-socialist style, but The Jungle is much more eye-opening, compelling, and insightful than this tepid successor. By comparison, The Metropolis feels shallow and poorly thought-out.

Allan Montague is a lawyer born and raised in Mississippi. Despite his Southern upbringing, his father fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. After Dad’s death, Allan moves to New York City, along with his mother and cousin Alice. Allan hopes that, through his deceased father’s connections, he can find some profitable work in the big city. Allan’s younger brother Oliver already resides in New York. He lives the life of a wealthy man, but it is unclear what exactly he does for a living. Oliver is active in high society, and he introduces Allan, Alice, and Mom into his high-dollar social circles. The Montagues attend a series of lengthy and lavish parties in which no frivolous expense is spared. The hosts of these parties expend enormous amounts of money in an attempt to outdo one another. It’s unclear why exactly these millionaires would welcome the Montagues into their circle, since the family from Mississippi are merely upper middle class. Nevertheless, Allan Montague is the reasonable man through whose eyes we view the outrageously extravagant lifestyles of these kings and queens of New York society. 

The bulk of this book is just Sinclair rattling off examples of insane things the rich spend their money on, and how much those luxuries cost. This goes on for chapter after chapter. For example, a woman had a million-dollar coat that was made from the feathers of rare Hawaiian birds. Is this really the problem that’s plaguing American society? Not until Chapter 11, when Allan is hired as a lawyer to work on a lawsuit, does some semblance of a story actually begin. That plot thread, however, barely goes anywhere. If Theodore Dreiser wrote this novel, he would concentrate on the business, legal, and financial aspects of the story, perhaps to the point of inducing boredom. Sinclair, on the other hand, rushes through the legal case rather sketchily because he just wants to rant about the rich. He succeeds in getting his point across that the wealthy waste a lot of their money on stupid and useless stuff. There is a brief passage on the idiocy of fashion that’s rather well-said, but then Sinclair just resumes his catalog of expensive oddities: “There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras,” and so on and so on.

Sinclair never acknowledges the fact that all this expenditure of wealth might trickle down to the artisans who make these luxuries, the merchants who sell them, and the servants who clean and maintain them. He will try to shock you with the fact that a rich old woman employs 32 servants, but that’s 32 people who have jobs. (I’m a liberal, and I’m making these arguments. That’s how annoying this novel is.) Sinclair’s typical modus operandi would be to contrast his exaggerated rich people with some exaggerated poor people­—i.e. look at what the wealthy are doing while these workers starve—but in this book he never gets around to the poor people, other than a few brief comments the aristocrats make about labor strikes. Sinclair is too busy reciting all these Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not examples of extreme wealth and waste.

In general, I like Sinclair’s work (The Jungle is a masterpiece, in my opinion), but at times he can get carried away with his exaggerated black-and-white socioeconomic rhetoric to the point of campiness. Such is the case with The Metropolis, and it’s not even fun.

Strange News from Another Star by Hermann Hesse

Modern-day fables for grown-ups

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in the Black Forest of Germany. He eventually emigrated to Switzerland and became a Swiss citizen. Hesse is best known for novels like Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game, but he also published two volumes of short stories. His collection entitled Strange News from Another Star was published in 1919. The eight stories contained within were written from 1913 to 1918. Despite the book’s title, there’s no science fiction here. These tales do, however, exhibit a touch of fantasy like one would find in fairy tales or an episode of The Twilight Zone.

The stories here read like Aesop’s Fables if they were written for adults of the modern world. Hesse’s writing could be characterized as neo-romantic, meaning it is heavily influenced by, but slightly more realistic than, the old-school German Romantics like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and company. In these stories, Hesse never aims for a realistic portrait of what life was like in a specific region of Germany. Instead, he strives to express universal truths about human nature. Hesse’s fiction tends to take place in vaguely unspecified quasi-medieval settings that could be anywhere in Europe. Often his characters don’t even have names, they’re simply “the young man,” “the girl,” or “the old man.” Hesse frequently presents a utopian vision of a simpler life, one where intellectual pursuits and an appreciation of nature take precedence over the more realistically pressing concerns of earning a living. Within these idyllic surroundings, however, the characters act out dramas in which peace and contentment are disturbed by the darker forces of human nature and modern life, thus forcing the protagonist to embark on some sort of soul-searching quest.

In the title story, “Strange News from Another Star,” a citizen of one of such Hessian utopia makes a journey to our real world of post–World War I devastation, contrasting the paradise of peace that might have been with the death and destruction of modern Europe. Although the word “star” is used, there is no space travel involved. “Star” could easily be rephrased as “another country” or “another [metaphorical] world.” Hesse was a writer who was always searching and experimenting, and as a result, his experiments don’t always pay off. In “Hard Passage” and “A Dream Sequence,” for example, the stories start out well enough but then veer off into too much surrealism that obscures the moral of the story. “A Dream Sequence” is just that, a dream scene that feels as if it were lifted out of some novel and presented out of context.

The strongest entries in the collection appear at the end of the volume. In “Fuldam,” residents of the titular town gather for their annual fair, where a mysterious stranger appears who has the power to grant everyone one wish. In “Iris,” a young boy spends his time daydreaming, studying flowers, and observing the natural cycles of the seasons. When he grows into a man, he loses his childish spirit and grows dissatisfied with life. These two stories, and most others in this volume, successfully combine elements of romanticism, fantasy, and realism. If this book had been published a half century later in Latin America, the style might have been dubbed “magic realism.”

Hesse’s other collection of short stories, entitled Stories of Five Decades, was published after his death in 1972. It is a career retrospective of sorts, containing 23 stories from over the course of his long career. That volume is every bit as good as Strange News from Another Star. Though Hesse is best known for his novels, he was a quite masterful practitioner of the short story, as evidenced in both of his fine short fiction collections.

Stories in this collection

Augustus

The Poet

Flute Dream

Strange News from Another Star

Hard Passage

A Dream Sequence

Fuldam

Iris

Lessons in Pictorial Composition by Louis Wolchonok

Forgotten gem of a how-to art book

If you habitually haunt used bookstores, then you are no doubt familiar with the publications of Dover Books. This is doubly true if you are to any degree an artist. Dover publishes cheap, no-frills reprints of a wide variety of old books, from the greatest classics in world literature to wordless books full of clip art. The Dover catalog includes many obscure and forgotten old books, one of which is Louis Wolchonok’s 1961 book Lessons in Pictorial Composition. As an art school graduate and occasional would-be artist, I find most how-to books on art to be pretty useless. Not so with this book from Wolchonok, however. Although it’s an odd duck in the genre, this book actually has some really useful content for painters and draughtsmen.

Wolchonok (1898–1973) was a professional artist in New York City and taught at City College of New York. There is hardly any information on him to be found online except auction records of his works. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. Both the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art have works by Wolchonok in their collections. To my knowledge, he published three books on art, the others being Design for Artists and Craftsmen and The Art of Three Dimensional Design.

Over 700 sketches by Wolchonok illustrate his Lessons in Pictorial Composition. Almost all of these are entirely black and white, using only line-art hatching effects for shading. Only a few of the illustrations use halftone grays. Although Wolchonok does discuss color towards the end, the book contains no color illustrations. The 700 sketches in this book exhibit a wide variety of styles, from non-objective abstractions similar to something Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, or Werner Drewes might produce, to realistic landscapes and figures reminiscent of Ben Shahn, early Stuart Davis, or Reginald Marsh. Are they all beautiful? No, but they are all very well thought-out. Each one of these little drawings, most smaller than a credit card, could serve as the basis for a completed painting. I’ve seen some of Wolchonok’s paintings online, and I don’t like them much. These sketches, however, though dated to an earlier modernist period, are quite impressive. It would be difficult for any artist to fill a sketchbook with such a high quantity and wide variety of potentially productive thumbnails. Any artist who can learn from Wolchonok’s workmanlike example would no doubt experience a notable increase in inspiration and productivity.

When I went to art school decades ago, we were required to take many drawing and painting classes, of course. We were also required to take “design” classes, in which we worked through visual exercises to learn about concepts like line, shape, color, form, tension, balance, etc. Lessons in Pictorial Composition would be a fine textbook for such a course. Wolchonok’s Lessons only applies to good ol’ fashioned two-dimensional art—drawings, paintings, prints—not to today’s artworld landscape of found-object sculpture, conceptual art, and other high-falutin gallery fare. Theoretically, however, Wolchonok’s lessons could apply to digital art, which is also 2D.

A lot of how-to art books try to idiot-proof the creative process by telling you where to put your brush and what color to choose. The best books in the genre, and there are few, actually help you to think like an artist. Wolchonok’s writing in this book will not excite you, but he does competently get his points across. The images do most of the talking. Much like Edgar Payne’s Composition of Outdoor Painting, Lessons in Pictorial Composition largely succeeds as a visual reference of examples that artists can learn from, emulate, and build upon.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez

Dirty old man finds inappropriate love

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a novella by Colombian author and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014). It was published in Spanish in 2004, and an English translation was released the following year. This is a very short work that really belongs in a collection of short stories rather than a stand-alone book. This novella is not set in the fictional village of Macondo where many of García Márquez’s other works take place, like his famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and his other three novellas. Instead, Memories of My Melancholy Whores takes place in an urban setting. The city is unspecified, but based on the names of streets, parks, newspapers, etc., it’s a safe bet to say the story is set in Colombia. 

The novella is narrated by an elderly man who I believe is unnamed. Some refer to him as “the scholar.” He appears to be a writer and perhaps a former academic of some sort. He writes a weekly column for his city’s newspaper. This man has never married. He states that in his entire life he has never been in love and has only slept with prostitutes—around 500 different prostitutes by his count. On his 90th birthday, this man decides that he wants to celebrate the landmark event by deflowering a young virgin, so he calls up his favorite madam, who agrees to procure the virgin for him. When he shows up at the whorehouse, he is led into a room where he finds a naked 14-year-old girl lying asleep. Rather than claim the service he paid for, the old man decides to simply watch the girl sleep. The way this is presented, García Márquez seems to want us to find this charming, but the old man also fondles the girl while she sleeps, which is not charming. Even though the two do not speak, the man falls in love with the girl, or so the author would have us believe. The scholar returns to the bordello for repeat rendezvous with this girl, who remains a sleeping beauty during their encounters.

Obviously, there’s some problematic subject matter here. Even García Márquez, one of the most highly acclaimed authors of the last 75 years, did not get a free pass on this creepy sex fantasy. The work was met with some critical and public backlash upon its publication. This is not really an erotic tale, and the sexuality is more implied than graphic. García Márquez uses the whore scenario to comment on old age, lost youth, masculinity, and mortality. The story is told with an attempt at humor that includes dirty-grandpa jokes about the old man’s sexual prowess. Prostitution, even child prostitution, is romanticized in this book as if it were some kind of cultural touchstone. Love between old men and young women has been a common theme in literature since ancient times. The way García Márquez tells this story has a feeling of mythology or fable about it, like when Zeus used to come down from Olympus and deflower virgins. It’s not quite the clueless pedophilia one finds in a lot of Victorian novels, but it’s pedophilia nonetheless, and García Márquez should have known better. An esteemed author might have gotten away with this in 2004, but two decades later it’s unlikely a man could publish a story like this without it inspiring some well-deserved outrage.

Regardless of its controversial subject matter, Memories of My Melancholy Whores just isn’t that great of a read. It’s not only offensive but also feels inconsequential. It just left me wondering what’s the point?

Hombre by Elmore Leonard

A riveting classic Western

Elmore Leonard is famous for his crime novels, many of which have been adapted into popular films in recent decades, but back in the 1960s and early ‘70s Leonard was known for his Westerns. Leonard’s fifth novel Hombre, published in 1961, is likely his best-known Western, due largely to the 1967 film adaptation starring Paul Newman, one of the best American-made Western movies of the 1960s—a decade that was full of great Westerns. The film Hombre changes some of the characters’ names and relationships, but the overall story is very faithful to the novel. Just as the movie is one of the all-time classics in the genre of Western film, Leonard’s novel is an outstanding work that holds a similar position in the Western genre of literature. Hombre the novel is riveting from start to finish.

For various reasons too complicated to explain here, a half dozen folks are riding in a stagecoach headed South towards Bisbee, Arizona. Among them is John Russell, whom some call by the nickname of Hombre. Russell is three-quarters White, one-quarter Mexican. As a child, he was abducted by Apaches and lived with them for several years, becoming accustomed to their way of life. As a young man, he reentered White society, but many of the townspeople still consider him an “Indian,” which, among most Whites in those days, was not a compliment.

When the passengers in the stagecoach find out about Russell’s Apache background, they decide they don’t want him riding in their presence anymore, so he is asked to sit outside with the driver. When the stagecoach encounters trouble, however (as stagecoaches often do in Western stories), and lives are in danger, to whom do they turn to save their bacon and guide them to safety? Russell, of course; he being the most capable man in the party. Russell hasn’t forgotten, however, the insult and ill treatment from his fellow passengers, and it’s unclear how much he’s willing to help them. As for the trouble encountered by the stagecoach, that’s better left unspoiled. The danger is multiplied, however, by the fact that this party is in the middle of the Arizona desert, and water is scarce.

Hombre is a revisionist Western, in that it takes a nontraditional approach to heroism and a more honest look at the status of Native Americans and Mexicans in American society than you’re likely to find in an old John Wayne movie of the 1940s or ‘50s. Although there is still a touch of Wild West romanticism to this story, for the most part Leonard’s novel is very realistic. There are no white-hatted saints among this cast of characters, and no one performs any heroic feats of gunplay that are outside the realm of reason. Unlike many Westerns of the 1960s, Leonard chooses not to ramp up the violence. In fact, the objective of the characters in this book seems to be to fire as few shots as possible and make them count. The plot is a cat-and-mouse game between Russell and his adversaries. Everyone’s actions and reactions are realistic and ring true to the natures of the individual characters. My eyes were glued to the page as I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. As is often the case in Leonard’s books, the dialogue is pitch-perfect—clever and sharp without being ostentatiously so, and with a slight touch of humor that doesn’t belie the peril of the situation.

I’m not a habitual reader of Westerns, but I love Leonard’s work in this genre. Hombre is one of the best Westerns I’ve ever read, up there with Charles Portis’s True Grit. Leonard’s novels Valdez is Coming and Last Stand at Saber River are also top-notch entries in this genre.

The Later Life by Louis Couperus

Midlife crises in The Hague

The Later Life is a novel by Dutch author Louis Couperus (1863–1923). It is the second book in a four-novel quartet called Small Souls or The Books of Small Souls. (The first novel in the series is also titled Small Souls). The Later Life was originally published in the Netherlands in 1902, which is the time period in which the novel is set. It was first published in English in 1915.

Small Souls introduced us to the extensive Van Lowe family of The Hague, and the family drama continues in The Later Life. This second novel begins about two months after the end of Small Souls. In that previous book, Constance van der Welcke (née van Lowe) had a confrontation and a falling out with the rest of the Van Lowe family. After fleeing to Paris to be alone for several weeks, she returns to her husband and son in The Hague. Soon, the Van der Welckes patch up relations with Constance’s relatives and resume attendance at the family dinner parties.

The Later Life seems quite a bit shorter than Small Souls, and there is less going on in this second outing. Instead of bouncing around the entire Van Lowe family, here the focus remains primarily on the Van der Welckes: Constance, her husband Henri, and son Adriaan. Shortly after returning from Paris, Constance comes to the realization that her husband and her niece Marianne are in love with each other, though so far the interaction between the two has remained innocent. Meanwhile, an old school chum of Henri’s named Brauws returns to The Hague and becomes the frequent dinner guest of the Van der Welckes. Despite his history with Henri, Brauws forms a closer bond with Constance, and she falls in love with him. Much like her husband’s budding romance, there has been no physical affirmation of the relationship, just conversation. Will either of these harmless infatuations develop into full-fledged infidelity?

The title “The Later Life” may seem to imply that the novel is about senior citizens, but the three main players in this love quadrangle only range in age from their late thirties to their early forties (Marianne is about 19 or 20). Constance, Henri, and Brauws, however, all go through some sort of midlife crisis in this book and find themselves contemplating their lost youth. They are all dissatisfied and depressed by their present state of living. They’re lonely, trapped in loveless relationships, and/or depressed by the lack of meaning in their lives. Each wonders if he or she can finally find true happiness in later life, or is it too late to make a fresh start?

The phrase “small souls” is brought up more than a few times in the first two novels of this series. Couperus uses these words to signify the restrictive societal conventions under which these characters have developed and continue to live their lives. While somewhere in the world surely people are truly living lives that matter, the Van Lowes’ lives revolve around petty aristocratic concerns over what is proper or what people might think. “The world is full of mighty problems; and we . . . we are pigmies . . . in the tiny world of our own selves. . . .” says Brauws. Whatever was the equivalent of the Victorian era in the Netherlands, Couperus’s novels don’t so much rebel against it as rather critically acknowledge it as a pervading fact of life. Constance is the only one in her family who even questions the established order of things—whether these dinner parties or social engagements even matter. At 43, she realizes that she’s never really been in love, that she’s never even really lived. In the Small Souls series, which has proven a great read so far, Couperus reveals the existential angst beneath the veneer of upper-class respectability.