मराठीत Georges Simenon (१९०३-१९८९) यांचे एकतरी पुस्तक अनुवादित झाले आहे का याबद्दल मी साशंक आहे पण मला ते फार आवडतात...
त्यांचे मी संपूर्ण असे एकच पुस्तक वाचलंय : १९६१ साली प्रसिद्ध झालेले "The Train"... पण मी ते वाचत गेलो आणि पुस्तकमय झालो...त्यानंतर त्या पुस्तकावर आधारित एक उत्तम सिनेमा सुद्धा पहिला...
त्यांनी जवळजवळ ५०० पुस्तके लिहली आहेत...
त्यांच्या बद्दल मी अलीकडे बरेच वाचले आहे...
जॉन ग्रे यांनी त्यांच्यावर न्यू स्टेट्समन मध्ये २०१६ साली लेख लिहला आहे...
"... Simenon is sometimes read as a writer who offers no hope. It is true that he holds out no prospect of redemption, whether for his characters or for humankind. Yet there is nothing in Simenon’s work of the horror at the human condition that is expressed in some of the stories of Guy de Maupassant – in other respects a comparable writer. Those of Simenon’s protagonists who are not destroyed in the course of attempting to escape their lives return rid of their illusions and readier to enjoy what the world has to offer.
The final effect of Simenon’s work is not depressing, but liberating. Before he left his life behind, M Monde “was a man who, for a long time, had endured man’s estate without being conscious of it, as others endure an illness of which they are unaware. He had always been a man living among other men and like them he had struggled, jostling among the crowd, now feebly and now resolutely, without knowing whither he was going.” When he finds his way back to his family and business, he is more relaxed. “He was part of life, as flexible and fluid as life itself.” M Monde may be the man Simenon wanted to be, and in some degree did become: “a man who had laid all ghosts, lost all shadows, and who stared you in the eyes with cold serenity”."
Julian Barnes यांनी लंडन रिव्यू ऑफ बुक्स मध्ये Simenon यांच्यावर मार्च १९८३ च्या अंकात लेख लिहला होता:
"... Georges Simenon did three things compulsively in his life: he wrote fiction (about 220 novels under his own name, plus 200 pseudonymous novellas); he went to bed with women (ten thousand at his first public estimate, later amended to ‘tens of thousands’); and he dictated his memoirs (20 volumes were published, with fans repeatedly begging him to stop)...
...Here is a typical sexual encounter from the Twenties, at the time of the writer’s engagement to his first wife:
With Simenon, early one morning, lying awake in the Hotel Berthe, the need was so great that when he heard a chambermaid outside in the hallway cleaning the guests’ shoes, he got up, opened the door, lifted the girl’s skirt and possessed her on the spot – while she was brushing away. She did not even stop what she was doing but merely said: ‘Oh Monsieur!’
Now skip two marriages, 40 years and nine thousand-odd other women, and catch the truth-seeker’s first sexual encounter with Teresa, his present housekeeper-companion:
A month after she started work at Echandens, I unexpectedly walked into a room and found her bending over a table that she was polishing. The sight was too much for me. I advanced upon her, feverishly pulled down her knickers and penetrated her ... Teresa did not play the coquette. She had an orgasm as violent as mine, still bent over the table, with a duster or chamois leather in her hand ... We did not even look at each other. I just walked out of the room and locked myself in my office.."
