Universal Simenon

When most of the hacks who occupy the media scene today will have disappeared with all hands in the dustbin of literature, millions of readers around the world continue to commune in the immortal work of Simenon.

We can make it all the reproaches we want, that it was always writing the same novel or its vocabulary is limited to two hundred words, the fact remains that he has created himself, the little Liegeois who had left school at thirteen, a universe that rivals that of Balzac in its scope and that of Dostoyevsky by its moral significance and psychological depth.

Each of his books, even the most trivial, conceals a fundamental human truth which is of all countries, of all races, of all time.

I do not know many novelists who have been able to access such universality.