Waiting times in hospitals are always long, very long. It is an obsessive time for comrades. Journalist Luz Sánchez-Mellado explained last week that his father’s illness and death prompted him to take Lexatin, a well-known antidepressant. I match with George Simenon. I get a Maigret or two, and if things take too long, as needed. Simenon is a powerful pain reliever. His books are so well written that his letters flow easily through your neurons and even minimally he manages to detach them from obsessive focus and allow you to breathe.
On this occasion, I eased the wait with the first Maigret I randomly picked off the shelf before heading to the hospital. Her name is Maigret Hesite. Coincidentally, Maigret doubts is the first title of a new collection of “maigrets” that Anagrama and Acantilado have released in a recent attempt to publish Simenon’s entire work in Spanish. It was as if luck or fate had ordered me to read it again, and I can’t help but remember that Simenon called his other novels “novels of destiny”, romance de la destinée, in French, romance de la destinée, in which the famous commissioner did not star. is feminine.
Like Maigret and Monsieur Charles, Maigret is undoubtedly a portrait of the Parisian upper bourgeoisie of the late sixties and early seventies; here, as he says, “morality is no different from the neighborhood”. A compassionate portrait with the theme of human responsibility in the background. The narrator remembers that before joining the police force, young Maigret studied medicine for several years and was forced to leave due to family circumstances. He says that maybe if he had continued, he would have majored in psychiatry. There was no place, but the reader knows that for the curator what really matters is the mysteries of the human soul. “I’m just an officer whose job is to seek the truth with the means at his disposal,” he will say humbly.
I’ve read a lot of Simeno over the years. I know I haven’t read the whole of Simenon because I know he has a book I haven’t read and I don’t want to read it for now. It’s a letter to my mother. It is a book that always gives me a hard time reading, and always amazes me. He wrote this from eight days spent with his dying mother in a hospital. This time, I’m afraid I won’t be putting off reading too long, and soon I will read Letter to my mother, the last Simenon.