Books in Brief: Letter to My Mother

Letter to My Mother, by Georges Simenon (Harcourt, 91 pp., $5.95). This is ostensibly a new kind of book for Simenon (“Having put his many-roomed house near Lausanne up for sale and changed his mode of life drastically,” says the dustjacket blurb, “Simenon also changed his writing habits. His creative powers are now channeled into autobiographical and confessional reminiscences, which he no longer types but dictates”), but in one sense the newness is probably more important to Simenon than to the reader. For he is doing in Letter to My Mother essentially what he has always done, both in his romans policiers, where Maigret solves crimes not with Holmesian deduction from physical clues but rather by entering into the criminal’s mind, and in his romans psychologiques, where the narrator begins from an established point of view and works backward and forward over time to correct his perceptions. The difference here is that the narrator is Georges Simenon, and the character whose motives he is trying to divine is his own loved-hated mother. There are, alas, other differences as well. Despite its smallness, the book is repetitive in a way that suggests it was indeed not typed but dictated: and perhaps also that its subject robbed the author of the ruthlessness essential to artistic control. This is not helped by the translated-from-the-French quality stamped all over Ralph Manheim’s translation. Those who do not know Simenon’s work are advised to start elsewhere—The Confessional, or almost any Maigret book. However, dyed-in-the-wool Simenon fans will be interested, and I hope moved, by the real-life basis for the novelist’s preoccupations.