One thing is certain, each novel by Georges Simenon is a treasure chest of literature, a lectio on the power of the gaze, on the blind spots of relationships. It also happens in the pages of «The Old Woman» (Adelphi, tr. Simona Mambrini), written in 1959 and up to now unpublished in Italy, which rightfully ranks among his most intense novels of psychological introspection.
The scene is an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, in Paris, where four women observe each other, spy on each other, ready at any moment to humiliate and strike. The old woman does not belong to the Maigret cycle nor to that of social noir, rather it is an experiment in moral claustrophobia, an investigation without a crime in which the only real battlefield is intimacy.
Juliette Viou, elderly and apparently defenseless, enters the life of her niece Sophie accidentally, welcomed into a storage room. Juliette observes, listens, collects information on the routine of that microcosm. Simenon builds the character with surgical precision: the old woman is not a monster, but a strategist of affection, capable of transforming tenderness into blackmail.
Every gesture – a lunch, a bottle of wine, a seemingly innocuous question – contributes to imperceptibly shifting the balance between Sophie, her protégé, Lélia and the maid Louise. Simenon conveys, page after page, the growing tension without ever raising his voice, relying on an accumulation of minimal details that end up becoming gradually unbearable. Simenon does not take a position, does not absolve or condemn. But observe everything. The desire triumphs, the need to be needed, to save the other or to become their executioner. Sophie and Juliette play the same game on Lélia’s body, crushed between the two women in that apartment because helping someone – or, as grandmother Juliette says, “picking up sick dogs from the street” – can also be a form of domination, and emotional dependence is no less violent than economic dependence.
Each of Simenon’s novels exhibits dry, relentless prose, devoid of any complacency. There is no catharsis, there is no solution. A bitter and inevitable ending leaves the feeling that one cannot emerge from certain bonds unscathed, but between Julietta and Sophie the showdown is played out on feelings of guilt. «The old woman» is one of Simenon’s most bare and disturbing texts, a novel as short as it is sharp.