translated from the French (Belgium) by Stuart Gilbert – published 1952
English translation title is Home Town published by Penguin in 1952 with The Green Thermos under the title On The Danger Line. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. Mine is a first edition found in Addyman’s in Hay-on-Wye.
This is Simenon at his best, and a fine example of why his romans durs reward the effort of tracking them down. The title loses something in translation: a faubourg is an outlying district with its own character, and that sense of a lived-in place runs through the whole book.
As in the best of the romans durs, the drama comes from relationships, not plot. Simenon pares everything back, yet the townspeople are drawn with extraordinary precision. Each feels fully formed, and a few economical strokes reveal their habits, pretensions and quiet cruelties. It is a novel about returning to the place you came from and finding that memory and reality no longer quite match.
It is out of print and hard to find, which is a shame, because it deserves a wider readership. For anyone who already loves the romans durs, it’s well worth hunting down. It stands comfortably among his strongest work. And lies sleeping, waiting for a publisher, so,it can be rediscovered..
It was this book, and this translation, that hooked Norman Mailer into becoming a Simenon fan, and going on to read most of his work.
My GoodReads score 5 / 5
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