Monsieur Monde Vanishes

By Georges Simenon
Translated from the French by Jean Stewart
Introduction by Larry McMurtry

Monsieur Monde is a successful middle-aged businessman in Paris. One morning he walks out on his life, leaving his wife asleep in bed, leaving everything. Not long after, he surfaces on the Riviera, keeping company with drunks, whores and pimps, with thieves and their marks. A whole new world, where he feels surprisingly at home—at least for a while.

Georges Simenon knew how obsession, buried for years, can come to life, and about the wreckage it leaves behind. He had a remarkable understanding of how bizarrely unaccountable people can be. And he had an almost uncanny ability to capture the look and feel of a given place and time. Monsieur Monde Vanishes is a subtle and profoundly disturbing triumph by the most popular of the twentieth century's great writers.

Reviews

The best mystery writer today is a Belgian who writes in French. His name is Georges Simenon.
— Dashiell Hammett

Simenon's powerful imagination is what makes his novels so engrossing. One novel leads to another ... until the reader comes to feel that he has discovered a world.
— Richard Vinen, The Times Literary Supplement

A truly wonderful writer... marvelously readable—lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates of rundown hotels, cold, dark barges, quayside canal-taverns, lurking prostitutes, potbellied burghers, taciturn youths, slippery barmen.
— Muriel Spark

The most extraordinary literary phenomenon of the twentieth century.
— Julian Symons

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.

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.

The Widow By Georges Simenon Translated from the French by John Petrie Introduction by Paul Theroux Two outcasts, a widow and a recently released murderer, become involved in a love triangle with the girl next door. Published in the same year and often compared to The Stranger, The Widow is one of Simenon's most powerful and disturbing romans durs.

Sign up for our free email newsletters for updates and special offers on NYRB books.