The Widow

By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by John Petrie
Introduction by Paul Theroux

The Widow is the story of two outcasts and their fatal encounter. One is the widow herself, Tati. Still young, she's never had an easy time of it, but she's not the kind to complain. Tati lives with her father-in-law on the family farm, putting up with his sexual attentions, working her fingers to the bone, improving the property and knowing all the time that her late husband's sister is scheming to kick her out and take the house back.

The other is a killer. Just out of prison and in search of a new life, Jean meets up with Tati, who hires him as a handyman and then takes him to bed. Things are looking up, at least until Jean falls hard for the girl next door.

The Widow was published in the same year as Camus' The Stranger, and André Gide judged it the superior book. It is Georges Simenon's most powerful and disturbing exploration of the bond between death and desire.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

Simenon's romans durs are extraordinary: tough, bleak, offhandedly violent, suffused with guilt and bitterness, redolent of place . . . utterly unsentimental, frightening in the pitilessness of their gaze, yet wonderfully entertaining.
— John Banville

[Further] examples of M. Simenon's ability to grasp entirely dissimilar milieux and to demonstrate the universality of the tragedy to be founding both of them...There is a harsh, almost Biblical intensity to M. Simenon's catalogues of punishment: he is a believer in original sin.
— The New York Times

Simenon's novels of suspense…unfold with a relentlessness, a sense of compulsion, that is as chilling as the deeds to which his people are driven by the quirks of character within them…One of the greatest and most prolific of the modern French creators of fiction, the author is notable for the clean economy of his writing style.
— Philadelphia Inquirer

Strong, terrible, splendid stuff her, by one of the world's strangest, most notable talents.
— Houston Chronicle

Marked by a brutal and earthy realism…Extremely readable.
— Eerie Times

Georges Simeon is not only a master of suspense, he knows also how to probe so deeply into the minds of his characters as to reveal with remarkable fidelity the more evasive of human motives.
— Cleveland Press

As the New York Review of Books Classics series publishes Simenon after Simenon at a rate the novelist would envy, it's tempting to read them all in a lump, as an extensive, though still partial, psychological portrait of the writer.
— The Nation

These books…are not mysteries…They are hard, blunt, frequently punishing studies of human beings driven by circumstance and personality to the ends of their tethers, forcing them to extreme measures…They are acute, compact, remarkably varied, and as lapidary as great pop songs.
— Bookforum, Luc Sante

Also see:

Dirty Snow By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by Marc Romano and Louise Varese Afterword by William T. Vollmann Dirty Snow, widely acknowledged as one of Simenon's finest books, is a study of the criminal mind comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me.

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by Marc Romano and Lawrence G. Blochman Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates An actor and a divorcée meet in a deserted New York City bar. With little in common save loneliness, middle age, and a presentiment of escape, they improvise a love story.

Monsieur Monde Vanishes By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by Jean Stewart Introduction by Larry McMurtry Unsurpassed as an evocation of milieu, whether of staid bourgeois propriety or waterfront seediness, Monsieur Monde Vanishes is another triumph by the twentieth century's greatest popular novelist.

Tropic Moon By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by Marc Romano Introduction by Norman Rush In Tropic Moon, Simenon, the master of the psychological novel, offers an incomparable picture of degeneracy and corruption in a colonial outpost.

The Man Who Watched Trains Go By By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by Marc Romano Introduction by Luc Sante How different are the cautious routines of ordinary life from the compulsions of a killer? How reliable is even the most reliable man's identity? What finally is the truth about a person?

Red Lights By Georges Simenon Translated by Norman Denny Introduction by Anita Brookner Red Lights, one of Simenon's romans durs, is a dark and brilliant gaze at marriage, and is Simenon writing the American psyche at his best.

The Strangers in the House By Georges Simenon Translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury Introduction by P.D. James In The Strangers in the House, Georges Simenon, master chronicler of the dark side of the human heart, gives us a detective story that is also a tale of an improbable redemption.

The Engagement By Georges Simenon Afterword by John Gray New translation by Anna Moschovakis One of the most chilling and compassionate of Simenon's extraordinary psychological novels, The Engagement explores the mystery of a blameless heart in a compromised soul.

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