The Belgian novelist Georges Simenon (1903-1989), who wrote in French, was one of the most productive and popular writers of the twentieth century. Author of more than 500 novels, translated into doze...
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André Gide considered Georges Simenon to be one of the finest novelists of the century. He even went so far in 1939 as to state (as quoted in Cahiers de la Petite Dame, volume 4, 1977, p. 263) ...
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Critical Essay by Frank Occhiogrosso
[Simenon's] novels are taken seriously, I think, because, as they repeatedly demonstrate, Simenon takes human beings seriously. As Julian Symons has pointed...
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Critical Essay by Lucille Frackman Becker
The detective novel was to change … in the wake of the disillusionment with science that followed World War I. At the same time, faith in reason was di...
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Critical Essay by Erica M. Eisinger
Simenon's hero, Maigret, is a man's man. He is literally the champion of men, to the exclusion of women. Women play two parts in Simenon's worl...
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Critical Essay by Julian Symons
One cannot understand Simenon's work without considering his personality. In one sense it is true to say that what we are is what we do, but in another sense wha...
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Critical Essay by Lis Harris
[Simenon has an] extraordinary gift for making one yearn to be in whatever place he is writing about … No one observes the tics and mores of modern France with grea...
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Critical Essay by Paul Theroux
[The three novellas in "African Trio"] were written in the 30's and 40's, at a time when colonials were villains and Africans practically unk...
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Critical Essay by Peter Wolfe
Georges Simenon is one of France's busiest and most important living writers. His portraits of stony-broke loners on the run from themselves generate a psychologic...
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