Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Georges Simenon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"He lay down and closed his eyes in a rage, but nothing was as it should be, neither the shadows nor the light, nor the sounds, nor even the twittering sparrows, and his whole being tossed impatiently in the drab limbo."

The Belgian author Georges Simenon is mainly known for his famed series of psychological crime stories featuring Commissaire Maigret (I have reviewed three of his novels on Goodreads, the best of them being Cécile is Dead ). Monsieur Monde Vanishes (1952) is a standalone novel and, in fact, even if it begins at a police station, it is not a detective story at all. I would categorize it as a psychological novella (just about 130 pages) about a man taking a dramatic turn in his life: depending on the point of view, some will call the turn "a midlife crisis" while others "a moment of spiritual rebirth."

Norbert Monde is a successful businessman - he has inherited a brokers' and exporters' company that has carried the family name for over 100 years. Madame Monde notifies the police about her husband's disappearance: he has been missing for three days. The wife truthfully answers the Superintendent's question about her husband, yet the author astutely remarks that "sometimes nothing is less true than the truth."

From then on we look at things from Mr. Monde's point of view. He just can't take the kind of life he lives any more. He cannot sustain the focus needed to run the business while his personal life is in shambles: his first wife left him, he has nothing in common - and never really had - with his second wife. He can't stand her little black, cold, calculating eyes:

"[t]hat fixed stare. That unconscious, immense, haughty contempt, that apparent obliviousness to anything outside herself, [...]"

He considers his grown-up son a failure, nobody remembers his forty-eighth birthday, and he is unable to name even one person to whom he is close. Mr. Monde decides to chuck it all, escape from his dreary life, and perhaps find some sense of his existence. He takes the train to Marseilles and finds a room in a cheap hotel.

The powerful scene of Mr. Monde crying over his meaningless life in the hotel room is to me the highpoint of the novella.

"What was streaming from his whole being, through his two eyes, was all the fatigue accumulated during forty-eight years, and if they were gentle tears, it was because now the ordeal was over."

I find the first half of the novella, a deep psychological study, much better than the rest of the story where much happens, alas at the expense of the sharpness of psychological observations. The reader may find the ending surprising - as I did at the first moment, before I had the chance to think about it a little - but it is quite a fitting ending, from the literary point of view. Thus I am rounding up my marginal recommendation.

Two and three quarter stars.


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