George Simenon
Train
translation: Argyro Makarof
ed.. Agra, page 209

“Train” takes a chapter of 20th century history and turns it into a gallery of characters.

The excellent library of works by Georges Simenon, systematically created by the publishing house Agra, with translations by Argyros Makarov, is an offer that will satisfy all the friends of the Belgian author. Simenon is the whole world, and the black figures of Agra are the guide to this world. Simenon was exuberant, but with an oxymoron and a peculiar economy. His numerous novels reveal the way he worked, the intensity of his work and the naturalness with which he wrote, as a result of an extremely gifted perception of the external and internal world. Each of his books reveals a different side of himself to us, as does The Train, the latest in the Agra series (it would be nice if the series had numbered titles). In the short time that it came out, it has already become widespread and has shed light on a very interesting and important aspect of Simenon’s life. His experience of the drama of the Belgian refugees after the Nazi invasion of Belgium, the chapter of the Second World War, little known in Greece, forms the basis and historical outline of this novel.

While not autobiographical, The Train tells the story of Simenon’s stay in La Rochelle in western France, where Belgian refugees were sent, while at the same time using the powerful symbolism of the railway in relation to population displacement, trauma, ruptures and farewells on the road. traces of history. Simenon kept this story in mind for many years and finally wrote it into a novel in 1961. In La Rochelle, he spent three months in the refugee camps offering social work, and there he faced the turmoil of forced expulsion. And like any change, the movement of so many thousands of people realigns the center of gravity, affects the concept of home, family cohesion, marital fidelity, connection with the spirit of community.

Simenon gives us a primitive sexual atmosphere in tenements, on trains, behind the scenes of a refugee. His realism forces us to separate urban behavior from the dense urban network that supports it. The love story, which is the central canvas, is born in this atmosphere of liberation and vision of another self, which until then remained in twilight, inactive and frightened. “Train” takes a chapter of 20th-century history and turns it into a gallery of characters and a fresco of situations with a rhythm that never loses its tempo and tongue-in-cheek. In addition, Simenon’s translator Argiro Makarov developed a deep, personal relationship with this world, multifaceted, erotic, dark, deeply human. It’s worth finding the Lifo podcast, in which Nikos Bakunakis talks to Argyro Makarof about Simenone.

The Train was also made into a film, as were many other books by Georges Simenon. The film The Train (1973), directed by Pierre Granier-Defer, starred Jean-Louis Trintignant and Romy Snyder. The embodiment of the heyday of European cinema.