It’s as if she figures him out in an instant. She sees that he has nothing on him, no ties and no obvious direction either. Unlike the other passengers on the bus, Tati sees something different in Jean, something the others simply do not notice. Tati is unattractive, unkempt and somewhat rough around the edges, but she is also sharp and as tough as old boots.Īs the novel opens, Tati is taking the bus home from market when a young drifter, Jean, boards the vehicle. Having outlived her husband, she now shares the farmhouse with her father-in-law and owner of the farm, old Couderc. Amand in the Bourbonnais region of France. The woman in question is Tati Couderc, a forty-five-year-old widowed peasant who runs a farm close to St. With that in mind, I’ve been looking forward to trying another ever since.įirst published in 1942, The Widow is one of the few books by Simenon to feature a strong woman at the heart of its narrative. Even though Three Bedrooms was somewhat atypical of Simenon’s work, it gave me a taste for his romans durs (or ‘hard’ psychological novels). Back in April 2015 I read Simenon’s Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, a fictionalised account of the author’s impassioned love affair with Denise Ouimet, a woman he met in Manhattan in 1945.
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