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Description
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She remembered the car, the soft and cool leather of the seats, the rain on the windshield, and the fogged-up windows where she mechanically traced various shapes with her fingertip. She brought to mind the city, the lights shrinking with each drop of water, then the headlights of cars on the highway. She could recount, in the smallest detail, as if she were facing an interrogator or a doctor, everything that had happened since then.
She didn’t know what time it was. For the past three days and nights, she had no idea of the time, and daylight as well as the darkness of the night no longer mattered. Everything was tangled.
Across from her, the dark-haired woman spoke softly and emitted a sound similar to the murmuring of prayers in a church. Did she not know, being the wife of a doctor in addition, that Betty should not drink, that she had already drunk far too much, that physically and mentally she had reached her limits? She already lived elsewhere. She was sure that a new life was beginning for her, that it had already started, or almost, but it was still fragile, indeterminate.
Betty has dismantled her compromised life, almost inviting its destruction. She plunges into a tragic wasteland of alcohol and random men. She loses herself in a game of boundaries. Until one night, a mature, charming woman, Lorr, scoops her up in a provincial restaurant, and a strange relationship of care and dependence begins between them...
Betty is one of the most beautiful "psychological - hard" novels by Simenon, as he himself called them. The great director of French cinema Claude Chabrol made one of his best films based on the book, featuring Marie Trintignant and Stéphane Audran in the lead roles, in 1992.
BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Georges Simenon, Belgian francophone author, was born in Liège in 1903. He decided early to dedicate himself to writing. At the age of sixteen, he became a journalist at La Gazette de Liège. His first novel, published under the pseudonym Georges Sim, was released in 1921: Au pont des Arches, petite histoire liégeoise. In 1922, he settled in Paris with his wife, painter Réjane Ranson, where he wrote stories and novels in series across all literary genres. Between 1923 and 1933, nearly two hundred of his novels, over a thousand short stories, and countless articles were published.
In 1929, Simenon planned the first Maigret: Pietr the Latvian. The book was published by Fayard in 1931 and Inspector Maigret soon became extremely popular. Simenon wrote a total of seventy-two adventures featuring Maigret (as well as many short story collections – up to the last Maigret in 1972, Maigret and Monsieur Charles).
A little later, Simenon began to write what he called "novel-novels" or "hard novels": over one hundred and ten titles, from The Hotel of Alsace (1931) to The Innocents (1972), with the most famous works being The House on the Canal (1933), The Man Who Saw Trains Go By (1938 – Agra, 2004), The Mayor of Furn (1939), The Unknowns in the House (1940 – Agra, 2011), Three Rooms in Manhattan (1946 – Agra, 2007), Letter to My Judge (1947), The Snow Was Dirty (1948 – Agra, 2011), The Little Man from Archangel (1956 – Agra, 2009), The Escape of Mr. Mont (1945 – Agra, 2012), The Death of Belle (1952 – Agra, 2012), The Cat (1967 – Agra, 2010), Moonsickness (1933 – Agra, 2013), Striptease (1958 – Agra, 2015), The Man from London (1933 – Agra, 2014), Betty (1961 – Agra, 2016) etc.
Alongside this intensive literary activity, he traveled continuously; he left Paris and settled in Saran and later, during World War II, in Vande. In 1945, he left Europe for America, where he would reside for ten years. He then returned to France and settled permanently in Switzerland. From 1972 he decided to stop writing. Using a tape recorder, he thereafter dedicated himself to his twenty-two Dictations and then composed his voluminous memoirs Mémoires intimes (1981). He died in Lausanne in 1989. Many of his novels have been adapted for film and television.
COVER PHOTO
Betty from the film by Claude Chabrol, 1992.
Manufacturer
Specifications
- Author
- Georges Simenon
- Publisher
- Agra
- Type
- Crime
- Cover
- Soft
- Number of Pages
- 208
- Release Date
- 7/2016
- Publication Date
- 2016
- ISBN-13
- 9789605052287
Additional Specifications
- Series
- Jules Maigret
Important information
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