Read this book with a map of Liège in one hand. It is really the story of that city, from the perspective of three generations of the Mamelin-Peters family, and it is filled with specific references to named streets and other local landmarks. And at the same time, this highly autobiographical novel provides plenty of insight into this most obsessive of writers. The novel begins the day before the primary character, Roger Mamelin, is born, and it ends when he is 15 and World War I has just come to an end. Roger is born just after midnight, on Friday, January 13, 1903 (which his parents agree to lie about, and instead claim that he was born 11 minutes earlier, thus his birth certificate has his date of birth as January 12). His mother, Élise, was the thirteenth child in her family, although Simenon only seems to name 10 of her siblings: Léopold, Louisa, Marthe, Félicie, Hubert, Louis, Franz, Poldine, and Madeline. He also states that her husband, Désiré, has 13 siblings (at least there are 13 “mouths to feed” at their home), but he only mentions 5 of them by name: Cécile, Arthur, Lucien, Françoise, and Guillaume. There’s some irony in that Roger, as the alter-ego of this crazily driven author, gets a job in Germain’s Bookshop (“Contrary to what he would have imagined in the past, it was the passers-by who were in the aquarium and it was he who, through the bookshop window, watched them with a curiosity tinged with pity.”), where the owner attempts to stop him from doing any work that might give him (Roger) pleasure – and Roger incurs the owner’s wrath by showing, in front of an important customer, that he knows more than the owner about the novels of Dumas. In an interesting parallel, the narrator of The Man with the Little Dog also worked as an assistant in a bookshop with a not very benevolent owner.

Begins like a dreary Tristram Shandy as it takes almost 400 pages before it starts following Simenon's stand-in in earnest. There are passages of inner lives which are great but not enough to overcome the overall tediousness. ( )

If you are a fan of Georges Simenon, Pedigree is a book for you to read with intense interest. When Charles Kane,on his deathbed, in Citizen Kane,drops his snowflake toy, saying only
"Rosebud", he recalls his lost childhood. So, I think Simenon recalled his childhood very movingly in this almost autobiographical work.I'm glad I purchased a used copy from Europe to read. It's beautiful.Now, it summons the memories of a lost world, as well as the childhood of that little boy,georges Simenon. ( )

A largely autobiographical novel peering through the difficulties of life in Liege at the beginning of the last century by charting the story of a family, with all the unpalatable resentments, jealousies, pettiness, sour disappointment with a life that is not taking the right turns that can go on underneath the surface. The misery of human nature laid bare in a powerful book. ( )