"It was like a movie in slow motion...The reality seemed so new that he wasn't too sure if that it was, in fact, real."

This novel illustrates that strange feeling of having the real world briefly paused whilst a new relationship is on the horizon. However, reading this is more like trying to recall a dream. Written over 50 years ago, it almost feels as if the reader has been placed into a black and white film, with ladies in fine clothes, men in coats and hats, everyone smoking.

The narrator begins by observing his neighbours, wondering what leads to the sounds and shouts he hears, and very soon he has met a woman - emotionally wounded - and in the midst of the city, he feels seduced, and she takes his arm. How quickly can you get to know a stranger, even after intimacy? It's an age-old question - two people trying to find themselves in the arms of someone unknown.

"Later he remembered the smallest details from that night, though while he was living it, it seemed so disjointed as to be unreal....frightened of forgetting some part of himself there that he might never be able to find himself again."

It's a novel about confusion, about two people trying to find out who they are, and how they are to live in what remains of their lives. How do you rebuild your life so late in the day? Can you really start over in New York, or will you just repeat the same mistakes over and over? Will the past follow you forever? And of course, it's all set mainly in just three bedrooms. And there's a lot of walking.

I expected this to be an angst-ridden book about a one night stand - and yes, that's there, but it suddenly takes a surprising turn. We learn what led the characters to that night, and the narrator becomes a character, as opposed to someone almost invisible.

"What had happened? I didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore."

However, it's fair to say that the events of the meeting lead only to further questions, and further discontent for the narrator as he tries to learn something about his new companion, but most of what he learns leads to more questions. The more he learns, the more tortured he becomes. How do you discern truth from lies in someone you've just met?

"He was very happy. He was very unhappy....He was himself and someone watching himself."

I enjoyed it mainly of the different age that it evoked, the world my parents were born in but now long gone. Most of all, it was a novel of the immediate present. The past is only glimpsed, and the future barely conceived of until the last page, and they both know that the painful reality of life - the literal cold light of dawn - must eventually be confronted. Sudden new relationships remain the same even today, and from that perspective, the novel was terribly poignant.

"Two wandering creatures, set apart on the surface of the globe, lost in the thousand identical streets of a city like Manhattan.

Francis lives alone in a flat with paper thin walls where he can hear the same woman come to visit his neighbour every Friday night and leave at 7am every Saturday morning. Curiosity gets the better of him and he decides to get up a few hours before 7am so he can see what the woman looks like as she is leaving the apartment building. He decides on a cup of coffee in the early hours of the morning and meets a woman in the cafe.

Georges Simenon is a brilliant and prolific writer with a sometimes bleak, but always beautiful outlook on life.

I read this book without knowing anything about Georges Simenon and his writing legacy. Having previously escaped my radar, I have since learnt Simenon was a prolific Belgian writer and his works have been translated into many languages.

The cover of this book is what initially led me to choose this as my next read - the iconic setting of a lonely, smoky bar, somewhere in Manhattan. Reassuringly for readers, Simenon's short novel begins in this typical setting.

I initially thought the first few chapters were too brief and lacking in character development. But aware of the length of the book, I persevered to find the story perfectly suiting this style of writing. Towards the end of the book, I became so immersed in Simenon's supple prose and honesty - I didn't want it to end.

This book has already been blurbed as having a dreamlike quality - and it really does. The central character, Francois, is drifting along in an atmospheric state, unyielding to his feelings, which makes for a refreshingly brave read. Simenon is clearly adept at revealing the ugliness of obsession in juxtaposition with the beauty of both living and loving unreservedly.

A sombre, but compelling novel that I'm so glad I picked up.

Georges Simenon was a prolific Belgian writer, born in Liege in 1903. He was best known for creating the character of Detective Jules Maigret and published more than 400 novels and short stories.

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan is not one of seventy-five in the Maigret series, but rather a stand-alone study of a new relationship. It was first published in French as Trois Chambres a Manhattan, then in English by the New York Review of Books in 2003 and this version was translated by Marc Romano and Lawrence Blochman.

Full review: https://wanderingwestswords.wordpress.com/2020/08/01/three-bedrooms-in-manhattan-george-simeon/

If you like reading books that feel like walking endlessly at night, slightly drunk and completely (maybe even ridiculously) honest, you might enjoy this book. A story of two Europeans who started their life in America with mixed feelings. The meeting between a mildly successful French actor Francois, whose wife became more famous than himself and left him for a younger man, and Katherine, hardly categorized woman of a doubtful past, happens at night in a restaurant. They start talking and decide to spend the whole night walking, smoking and drinking scotch. Completely exhausted they end up in a room at a cheap hotel to sleep during the day to continue their night adventures later on. The more time they spend together, the more difficult it becomes to imagine parting ways.

Three Bedrooms in Manhattan reads like a French novel happening in New York. There is the weirdness of French relationships but with a less romantic setting. I was expected to enjoy it much more than I did. I just never really grew fond of the main characters and I didn't find their connection believable whatsoever. But maybe that was the point, who knows. It has a lot of potential in the atmosphere of night romance but it just didn't work for me.

This is a “classic” reprint of a novella by Simenon, who died in 1989. It is not one of his suite of better known Maigret detective stories, but a grittier tale apparently partly autobiographical and based on his meeting with his second wife. In this tale successful French actor Francois Combe (48) has moved to the USA to work after the breakdown of his first marriage. His younger wife, also an actress, apparently told him she was leaving him to move in with a 21 year old actor. We are told that he, disgruntled, was not prepared to live in a professional milieu where he would see them together and announced that he was moving to take up a “Hollywood contract”. In New York he had initially linked up with one colleague but otherwise failed to make the links to get himself work., Financially he started falling financially downwards, so had for the last 5 months lived in a tired apartment in increasing squalor and disintegration. This book is his recounting of the next few days then weeks of his life.
Drinking heavily he walks into a bar and sits down beside an unknown woman. They talk, walk and drink the night away before he takes her to a hotel. She, it turns out, is Kay Miller, 32, who is unemployed, homeless and broke. It transpires that, in desperation, she had intended to leave with the first man who asked her. “Fate” having thrown them together, they spend all the hours of the next few days together gradually piecing together the stories of the other’s life. Kay decides early on she has fallen in love with Francois, the “first time this had happened”. He zigzags between desire, jealousy, and uncertainty.
Substantially this novel is about the early building of a relationship, how from nothing one gains an awareness of another and has to come to terms with their past before they met. It talks to the tales one will tell another, in which order, and from which perspective and which aspects are withheld initially before intimacy is established. Developing friendships, or indeed love, may move at different speeds between two partners as a more secure relationship is established. Misunderstandings can occur, but the scale of compromises necessary for a happy life for both must be recognised and accepted. It seems that Combe’s mind in these matters moved slower than his actions and actively sabotaged the process refusing to believe how far he had come. Francois, jealous and mentally hyper-critical of Kay’s previous behaviour - comes later to “love” – but only after she is called away to a family emergency. His lack of her company allows him to finally move forward emotionally and when she returns he has decided they can move forward together.
Some reviewers will tell you that this book is both emotionally charged and “erotic”. Yes the relationship is both immediate and charged but it is also a lot more than that. It might be claimed that it is seen from the male perspective – deemed different from that of a woman - or that it is a book of its time; or evenly possibly that Francois carries damage from the loss of his first marriage (undoubtedly true). But from another perspective it could be seen as the early beginnings of a damaged relationship founded on possessiveness, verbal and physical aggression and controlling behaviour. This makes it, of course, timeless and a very uncomfortable read. It lays another layer of perspective on Francois’ behaviour, his perceptions and indeed why his wife may have left him in the first place. Maybe it indicates too that this is not a “new” relationship or future, but the recreation of the old.
If you find the nature of relationships fascinating then you might well find this book compelling. The immediacy of the action will carry resonance for most people who have built them. But it does have this dark undertone that is faintly repelling as well. Possibly this may not have been what the writer intended, but it is there.

Set in the backdrop of the late 40’s in New York City, two people meet by chance in a diner and instantly fall into the most complex relationship - a rollercoaster of doubts and emotions and a desperate need for each other.
This is a beautifully written novel and leaves the reader emotionally fraught until the end. I loved it.

Darkness Visible

Reportedly based on the author’s meeting with his wife, this novel is a portrait of an insecure and often selfish man who frequently resorts to violence or verbal cruelty in his treatment of his partner. It is a dark, bleak story which exerts a powerful grip on the reader, despite the unsentimental portrayal of the two flawed characters.

Combe is an unemployed French actor in New York, recently cast aside by his wife for a younger man. Kay is a divorced woman, who may perhaps have had an extensive number of lovers, who may be an incorrigible liar, or who may be a wounded woman seeking a final refuge from the trials of a sad life. In a resolutely unromantic account of their budding relationship, this reader finds himself cringing and repelled, yet fascinated and hoping for the success of the unlikely pair.

This Penguin cover image of Hopper's 'Nighthawks' couldn't be more appropriate for this book: it feels like we've walked into the painting where the man and woman at the all-night diner counter have now been given names, Francois and Kay, and that we follow them as they leave into the night... Even the stark oppositions of dark and shade colour the text.

Although written in Simenon's pared back prose, this is completely unlike his Maigret novels. There's definitely a sense of noir about the atmosphere (smoky piano bars, Manhattan's streets at night, taxis, whisky) but really this is a very interior book focalised through Francois and his sudden intense love affair with Kay. Both have pasts, both have plumbed the depths of loneliness, until a sudden serendipitous meeting changes everything. For all that this is about a relationship, it's a far cry from 'romance'.

I've heard it's based on Simenon's meeting with his second wife and, if so, it's a remarkably vulnerable and honest story that traces Francois's behaviour at its most unheroic: the push-pull of intimacy versus independence, the resentful neediness that leads to infidelity, even a shocking moment of physical violence (and Kay's non-response dates the book rather horribly). I found this a surprisingly authentic piece of writing.

What a struggle it was to get through this book, profoundly depressing for the most part, the two characters needy in their own ways and both yearning for and fearing embarking on a new love affair. I’m pleased I did, though, as it picked up towards the end and I started to appreciate it at last. Based on Simenon’s own experience in Manhattan in the 40s/50s and his meeting with his second wife, I believe, I can’t say he is someone whose company I would have been able to bear in person. Very effective in delivering its message, the mental turmoil of love in its early stages, it hasn’t quite put me off reading any more Simenon, but I think I’ll move on to something lighter and less personal in his extensive collection.

I understand the paper copy of this includes a foreword from Joyce Carol Oates and I wish I’d been able to read this, I’d have liked to see her take on it.

This fictionalised account of a real-life romantic infatuation by the author is written in Simenon’s understated, spare prose which captures the universality of human experience as allegories do. The rather repetitive storyline also evokes an hypnotic dreamlike mood, reflecting the obsessive nature of the relationship.
In Simenon’s cinematic and impressionistic style, the sense of timelessness in 'the city which never sleeps' is depicted in the sidewalks and seedy bars reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’ painting.
It’s an unexpected departure from the familiar Maigret novels, but well worth a read as an intriguing rare insight into an aspect of Simenon’s own character.

I didn’t like Three Bedrooms In Manhattan. I enjoy the Maigret books very much but I found this a disappointment.

It’s fairly plotless: a French actor has ended up in New York with little money left (although enough for an awful lot of whiskey drinking) and meets an enigmatic woman whose life story is hard to believe and they embark on a strange few days of walking through New York, drinking, lovemaking and the odd bout of misogynistic violence. It’s intended to be an intense character study (something Simenon was usually very good at) but it didn’t work for me at all. I didn’t really believe in the characters and I certainly didn’t care about them. There is a strong whiff of second-rate existentialist writing here, in that everything is a bit bleak, the protagonist does inexplicable things in an alienated way, and so on. It all seemed soulless and miserable to no purpose and I’m afraid it’s a genre that I can’t stand.

So, not for me, then. I’m afraid I gave up about two-thirds of the way through because I just couldn’t slog through any more. Give me a Maigret any day, but I can’t recommend this.

(My thanks to Penguin Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

This was my first Simenon. You can't argue with the suppleness of the prose (smoothly translated), the easy descriptions of Manhattan and, most importantly, his depiction of the central relationship. There's a lot here to enjoy, just don't expect to like the central characters too much or too quickly. Set in the early 1960s, it seems fairly timeless until period details jar such as when Francois suddenly stops to fill his pipe in the hallway or, more shockingly, he hits Fay suddenly and repeatedly in the face (although that and its effects are oddly never mentioned again). Simenon is particularly good on the illogicality of relationships - this one seems to go through months' worth of ups and downs in a few days - and the anonymity of the New York: "They lingered amid the city. They did it deliberately. It was in a crowd that they felt happiest'. And, although an obvious choice, the cover works well too. Glad I read it.