The Venice Train - Georges Simenon’s 1965 tale of mystery and suspense wherein a man's life is transformed forever by a chance meeting with a stranger on a train on route from Venice to Paris could be studied as a major work of existentialism focusing on themes of alienation, anxiety and absurdity.

The man is Justin Calmar and the chance meeting is with a gentleman having an Eastern European accent who asks Calmar for a favor - pick up a small case from a locker and take it to a Paris apartment. Sounds innocent enough, so he answers "yes."

But as Calmar discovers, his simple mission soon turns complex: the gentleman from the train mysteriously disappears after Calmar agreed to perform the favor; when he reaches the designated apartment, he sees a young woman has been the victim of murder; and, later that same day, when Calmar finally musters up the courage to break open the attaché, there’s an enormous amount of cash in French, Swiss and American bills.

Justin Calmar, an ordinary family man of conventional routine, is thrust into crisis. Should he go to the police? Impossible. His story is too far-fetched. It quickly dawns on Calmar: he is entangled in a crime, perhaps even involving an international syndicate, and from this point forward, he must watch his every word and action.

Reading Simenon’s slim work I was repeatedly reminded of the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Below are my specific observations linked with direct quotes from The Venice Train:

"I'm an honest man!"
He always had been. He had always done his best. He had often made sacrifices for other people, as he had done this time, spending his holidays on a beach he had hated from the first moment." --------- Calmar is married to Dominique and has his young daughter Josée and son Bib to consider, thus he continually acquiesces to their desires. But if one is forever remaining passive and doing things one hates, is this an authentic life? Sartre insists: “We are our choices.” Crisis forces Calmar to comes face to face with this stark truth.

"He would never admit it to Dominique, of course, but he had married primarily in order not to be alone." ---------- If we feel at ease and relish our freedom and independence when we are alone, we will never be lonely. But how many people feel the opposite, isolated and cut off, sensing a certain dread in silence and solitude, forcing them to constantly reach for their cell phone to chat, chat, chat in order to fill the void? As per Sartre: "“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”

"A blunder. The slightest detail might draw attention to him. It is just such unimportant facts that stick in people's memory and suddenly come back to them at the opportune moment." ---------- Careful, careful, Justin. One false move and you could land yourself in jail. Simenon preforms surgery on the psychology of a man caught in the web of absurdity. Calmar wonders: of all people, why me?

"That morning he had made a momentous discovery that affected him more than he had realized at the time: at home, in his own apartment, he, a man of thirty-five, married with children, a man with responsibilities, did not have a single place where he could hide an object." ---------- Justin Calmar is in a quandary: he must hide the money before his family returns from Venice but he doesn't have an inch of private space. And he knows he can't tell his wife a word about either the money or his predicament. He's isolated and any choices he makes must remain secret. Bye, bye, freedom! Bye, bye, tranquility!

"All this was far more complicated than it had seemed at first. Never until his return from Venice had he realized that he was the prisoner of a routine and that for twenty-four hours a day his acts and gestures were observed either by his wife and children or by his boss, colleagues, and the typists at the office." ---------- Oh, my, not only is Calmar not able to hid the money, he doesn't have any space to himself, anywhere he goes he remains under the spotlight of other people's judgements. Recall Sartre's famous: "Hell is other people."

"He simply had to find a solution. It was vital. He was sufficiently lucid to realize that he was undergoing a moral and nervous deterioration, that he was prey to panic more and more frequently, and that people looked at him with added interest." ---------- Using his wits, Calmar figures out where to hid the money and also over the next weeks devises a scheme to spend some of the money bit by bit: he tells Dominique he's following hot leads and gambling on the horses. But, alas, even this solution leads to more domestic turmoil. And more need to concoct fabrications. The consequence: Calmar's agitation increases and he resorts to frequent drinking.

"Bib had dictated to his sister a page-long list of presents he wanted; they included toys he had seen advertised on television." ---------- With all the "gambling" money coming in, his children want more and more. Calmar is faced with another basic truth: as humans we are in the realm of desire - the more we have, the more we want.

"In short, he was tired, for no particular reason, because of everything in general, and he wondered whether he would go on wearing his new suit or his new overcoat, which made him feel as though in disguise." ---------- Up to his neck in alienation and anxiety, Calmar begins to resemble Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist in Sartre’s novel Nausea, Life itself has become a sickness.

Georges Simenon once observed how an audience must view a tragic play in one sitting. Likewise, he wanted readers to follow his main character from beginning to end, from first page to last in one reading to order to gain the full impact of the protagonist's anguish. Simenon did not include politics or religion - he presented the modern human situation cut down to the bare bone.


Georges Simenon, 1903 - 1989

Simenon's wafer-thin novel - just slightly bigger than a novella - is a pretty standard affair from the James M. Cain school of noir, and would have been dated even at publication. Unfortunately, an unlikable - and uninteresting - protagonist sinks the book's already tired premise.

Returning ahead of his family from a Venice holiday, Justin gets a request from a penetrating stranger. Deciding to answer it, rips him from his staid existence and puts him on a far more terrifying railroad, with a destination far from home.

The book is small, but even so threatens to outstay its welcome. Everything about Justin - and every other character - is bland and more familiar than a well-worn pair of slippers. Simenon's prose, whilst not actively offensive, does not scintillate, and the plot's predictable progression (almost unpredictably predictable, if you can believe it) grows more wearisome as the book wears on.

Simenon wrote a genuinely staggering number of novels, so I'm unsure how representative this book is, or where it ranks in his colossal oeuvre. As a writing exercise, or a textbook example of a kind of noir novel you rarely see these days, it functions, as all the boxes get checked at appropriate moments. But then, I don't read novels for typical or textbook, and not even the fact it's an express could save this trip. ( )

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