L’autre Simenon par Patrick Roegiers

Abstract

Reviews 249 Roegiers, Patrick. L’autre Simenon. Paris: Grasset, 2015. ISBN 978-2-246-80461-1. Pp. 298. 19 a. This historical novel is based on the life of Christian Simenon, the younger brother of the Belgian writer Georges Simenon. Roegiers provides a psychological analysis of this younger son, his mother’s favorite, who never had any sense of self-worth or meaning in his life until he became associated in the 1930s and 1940s with a pro-fascist political group in Belgium called Rex. The leader of this organization was a political agitator named Léon Degrelle, who escaped prosecution after World War II by seeking refuge in Franco’s Spain. Less fortunate were many of his followers, who were either shot for treason and crimes against humanity or died on the Russian front fighting for Nazi Germany. In Roegiers’s novel, Christian is among the latter group, but in the appendix we learn that the real Christian Simenon joined the Foreign Legion and later was killed in Vietnam. In both fiction and reality, he was condemned to death in absentia for being one of the leaders of a mass murder that took place in the town of Courcelles in 1944 as a reprisal for the killing of a collaborator and his family by the Belgian Resistance. The character of Christian has a contemporary relevance for our day. He exemplifies the misfit who tries to give his existence some significance by allying himself with a destructive hate group, losing his soul in the process. Roegiers’s book becomes both a description and an indictment of the fascist mentality in Belgium that led to collaboration with the Nazi occupation on the part of political and religious conservatives. The reader is given a painful sense of the horrendous atmosphere of violence, hatred, and betrayal then prevailing. No one could be trusted, and everyone was subject to the most blatant violations of their basic human rights. This work is thus as much about Belgium in that period as it is about one individual. In some ways it is an accusation of a whole generation. The spirit of collaboration permeated in varying degrees a wide swath of people. Christian’s brother Georges receives almost as much attention as the protagonist. Although he was exonerated from charges of collaboration after the war,Georges Simenon is considered by Roegiers to have been guilty of shameful self-indulgence and a thoughtless disregard for the plight of so much suffering humanity while living in occupied France. (Although not mentioned in this book, Belgian cartoonist Hergé, creator of Tintin, came under a similar cloud of suspicion.) There is a memorable scene in Roegiers’s novel wherein Georges and his friend André Gide enjoy a luxurious meal of pressed duck at the Tour d’Argent before the Libération, at a time when there were severe food shortages. Roegiers’s book is highly thought-provoking. He is excessively given to neo-Rabelaisian verbal outbursts based on enumerations and word associations. He also punctuates his narrative with brief exchanges in dialogue form that serve as a kind of Greek chorus. University of Denver James P. Gilroy ...