Volume 52, Number 13 · August 11, 2005
Heart of Darkness
By Norman Rush
Tropic Moon (Coup de lune)[*] is the first of Georges Simenon's novels to be set outside Europe, and it is also among the first and best of his serious novels, those he called romans durs in order to distinguish them from the hundreds of genre fictions he produced, the romans populaires that were making him rich and world famous, including his psychological crime thrillers and the titles in the Inspec-tor Maigret series. It is a remarkable work, in which Simenon's characters deliver a brutal and clueless enactment of interwar French imperialism at its most naked—in Gabon, French Equatorial Africa, in the capital, Libreville, and upcountry. As a revelation of the institutionalized squalor the French Empire amounted to, it stands high, ranking with L.F. Céline's depiction of life in another part of the same empire, Cameroon, in his Voyage au bout de la nuit.
Feature, 2080 words
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