“The Traveler of the Day of the Dead” by Georges Simenon: book review

The young Gilles Mauvoisin lands in La Rochelle with a floor-length overcoat and a funny otter hat on his head. He comes from far away, from Trondheim, from a wandering life made up of deprivation and artists’ hotels, he has traveled in the company of death and with his lanky and pale figure he seems to want to embody it a day early.

“The Traveler of the Day of the Dead” by Georges Simenon

A novel in which Simenon enthusiasts will find two well-oiled cornerstones of the great Belgian writer’s narrative: the inscrutable madness of love, which breaks out trampling on conveniences and rationality, and the hostility towards those who are different, be they different in soul or origin. . Hostility that soon becomes the immune reaction of a community, eager to preserve balances and interests fossilized by time and determined to isolate and expel the foreign agent.

Thus Gilles ends up embodying the figure of a new Don Quixote who wanders lost and lonely in the humid salt mists of an Atlantic Mancha, accompanied by his mad love for an ethereal and elusive Dulcinea, and tenderly cared for by the figure of Jaja, an imposing popular icon and litmus test of the spiritual misery of the bourgeoisie and nobility, the only person to act out of goodness of heart in a congeries of interests even gathered in a syndicate.

Almost a fairy tale, in which the sheep will be forced to become a wolf to survive in the land of the wolves and to discover that those who belong to the sheep race and possess the meekness of the wolf will only be able to tolerate the wolf’s fur and bear its solitude.

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“The traveler of the Day of the Dead” by Georges Simenon, Adelphi Edizioni. Riccardo’s books