From Chronicles of a Liquid Society (2016) by Umberto Eco:

A significant transformation came about in the opposition between the religious and secular worlds. For thousands of years, the spirit of religion was associated with a distrust of progress, rejection of the world, doctrinal intransigence. The secular world, on the other hand, looked optimistically upon the transformation of nature, the flexibility of ethical principles, the fond rediscovery of “other” forms of religion and primitive thought.

There were, of course, those believers, such as Teilhard de Chardin, who appealed to “worldly realities,” to history as a march toward redemption, while there were plenty of secular doom merchants, with the negative utopias of Orwell and Huxley, or the kind of science fiction that offered us the horrors of a future dominated by hideous scientific rationality. But it was the task of religion to call us at the final moment, and the task of secularism to sing hymns in praise of locomotives.

The recent gathering of enthusiastic young papal groupies show us the transformation that has taken place under the reign of Pope John Paul II. A mass of youngsters who accept the Catholic faith but, judging from the answers they recently gave in interviews, are far distant from neurotic fundamentalism, are willing to make compromises over premarital relationships, contraceptives, even drugs, and certainly when it comes to clubbing; meanwhile, the secular world moans about noise pollution and a New Age spirit that seems to unite neo-revolutionaries, followers of Monsignor Milingo, and sybarites devoted to Oriental massage.

From On Decline: Stagnation, Nostalgia, and Why Every Year is the Worst One Ever (2021) by Andrew Potter:

For well over half a century, it’s been an article of faith, agreed to by all sides, that the right was the side of rules, order, tradition, and circumspection, while the left was the part of rebellion, individualism, freedom, and transgression. Now the political valences have reversed themselves, with the right setting itself up as the true countercultural opposition to the left’s restrictiveness and enforced conformity.

From After the Fact?: The Truth About Fake News (2020) by Marcus Gilroy-Ware:

Intolerable boredom, loneliness, precariousness and the disappearance of the future that is endemic to postmodernism, combined with a heavy emphasis on aspiration reduced to increasingly economistic terms, all produced widespread malaise that is hard to describe in specific terms for those that suffer it but is often demotivating or debilitating. The result is that we try to compensate, through the trappings of consumerism that have arisen to sell compensatory pleasure itself – the most obvious being the soaring popularity of delivery food, the seeming addictiveness of social media or gaming, or the quiet success of the sugar industry.

Inspector Luckless (that would be Lognon) gets shot in the gut while on a stakeout he’d been conducting so discreetly none of his fellow officers even knew what he was up to. So as the Paris police department’s resident sad sack fights for life in hospital it’s up to Maigret to find out what went down on the Avenue Junot.

One way that you can expect a series like this to go after so long a run is for it to become sillier. There are a lot of familiar elements in this one – Janvier had been shot in Maigret Takes a Room, a nosy neighbour played a key role in The Judge’s House, the dirty deeds done behind the façade of a great house is a staple – but they get rolled together here into a whimsical plot involving forged artwork, gangsters, and another ill-matched couple.

“You’ll find it hard to believe me because you’re not a collector,” the collector says as he tried to explain himself to Maigret. To which the detective chief inspector replies “I collect people . . .” His readers may be tempted to add, “I collect books . . .” This is what it’s sort of come to by this point.

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Hard to believe, but Maigret’s good friend Dr. Pardon has finally sounded the alarm about the detective chief inspector’s drinking problem. In order to spare Maigret’s liver, he’s recommended cutting down to just quaffing the odd aperitif instead of hitting the bar at all hours of the day while on a case.

Perhaps it’s the lack of lubricant that has made Maigret even grouchier than usual (as if getting old wasn’t bad enough). Whatever the cause, he does, as the title indicates, get angry at the end of this one. I had a hard time figuring out where things were going, but as it turns out the villain was running a kind of fake protection scheme, which is something Maigret takes personally as the protection being offered was from the police. To be honest, I thought it was a pretty good scam, and the guy running it was sympathetic, so maybe Maigret really did just need a drink.

A minor effort, but not bad, at least by the standards of the later books in the series. One point that caught my attention was that when Maigret, who doesn’t know how to drive, wants one of his lieutenants to take the suspect’s car he has to first check if he has “ever driven an American car.” In what way would driving an American car in 1963 be different from driving a French car? I’m guessing most cars at the time would have been standard transmission, so he’s not talking about that. I don’t think any mention is made of what make of car it is, only that it’s American and “big” (naturally). Which is, something that might have set him off too, come to think of it.

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A minor entry in the series, but perhaps better for not being as ambitious. It’s pretty easy to figure things out along the same lines that Maigret does.

And what we’re left with is another ending where justice is not so much denied as evaded, at least for a time. The killer walking free is pretty transgressive for a genre work, but despite avoiding a pat ending it’s not a very credible story and we never have any sense what’s making the tramp tick. I think he just wanted out of his marriage and found the most drastic solution imaginable.

Taking another step back, I read it as a parable, with the tramp being a holy man sent to point the moral, which is that final judgment belongs to God. “What’s impossible is to judge,” is all he’ll say. This fits with Simenon’s motto “Understand and judge not.” Not that I think Simenon always held to this, or that it’s the kind of attitude a detective chief inspector should adopt. Justice, at least of the human variety, requires judgment on someone’s part.

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From The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume One (1776) by Edward Gibbon:

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.

From Arguing with Zombies (2020) by Paul Krugman:

If you had to identify a place and time where the humanitarian dream – the vision of a society offering decent lives to all its members – came closest to realization, that place and time would surely be Western Europe in the six decades after World War II. It was one of history’s miracles: a continent ravaged by dictatorship, genocide, and war transformed itself into a model of democracy and broadly shared prosperity.

The titular caller is a pathetic creature with a hare-lip named Léonard Planchon. He has been showing up at the Quai des Orfèvres on Saturdays hoping to screw up enough courage to talk to the detective chief inspector about something, but has always chickened out. So instead he decides to go to Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, where Maigret lives, and catch the big guy at home.

This didn’t make much sense to me, but then nothing about Planchon rang true. He’s neither sympathetic nor believable. In today’s Internet manosphere language he’s an exaggerated type of the beta simp: a total loser who marries a hot girl who in turn shacks up with one of his employees, a guy who first supplants him in the bedroom (forcing him to sleep in the kitchen on a camp bed) and then takes over his house-painting business. Planchon wants to warn Maigret in advance that he’s thinking of taking . . . drastic measures. I thought for a while that we might be entering Before the Fact territory, which had the potential to get interesting. But then Planchon disappears.

No prizes for guessing what has happened. And given that the perps are a pair of wild animals, possessed of low cunning but low intelligence, it doesn’t take Maigret long to catch them out. Another weak effort, and a bit silly too.

Maigret index

Over at Canadian Notes & Queries my review of Tamas Dobozy’s Ghost Geographies is up. Solid story collection I was really impressed by.

Reading a book about Søren Kierkegaard yesterday, I came across a description of the Danish philosopher as “of the pycnic type,” something that “would lend a piquant touch to his psychological profile.” The word pycnic (more commonly spelled pyknic) completely stymied me. I don’t think I’d ever seen it before, and thinking it was a typo for picnic simply didn’t make sense given the context.

Pyknic is a word that’s very rarely used today. Derived from the Greek pyknos (for dense or thick) it refers to a body characterized as short and stocky, powerful but given to fat. It’s of recent vintage, with its first recorded use being in 1925. Since then I’ve heard that it’s been replaced by endomorph (a coinage from the 1940s), but it seems to me that endomorph — round and fat — isn’t quite the same thing.

As I say, it’s a term that’s fallen out of use, along with much of the science of classifying body types. I doubt I’ll have much occasion to use it, but it’s an interesting one to file away.

It’s sad evidence of how played out the Maigret series was getting that this one begins exactly the same way as the previous installment (Maigret and the Lazy Burglar): with the detective chief inspector being woken out of a dream to answer the phone, and a call which draws him in to deal with an especially tricky case. Plus there’s the fact that he’s starting to seem even more of a grumpy old man:

He was keen for the summer and the holiday season to be over, for everyone to be back in their place. He’d frown each time his eye lighted on a young woman in the street still sporting the tight trousers worn on the beach, feet bare and tanned, nonchalantly treading the Paris cobblestones in sandals.

If you’re so old you can’t appreciate nice things like a pretty girl in beach clothes than you really have turned a corner in life.

The title refers to a family of very good people. Things kick off with the father being found dead in his study. By most accounts he didn’t have an enemy in the world. But, as Maigret grumbles, “it’s the good people who give us the most trouble.” After a while the repetition of “good man” wears on him.

A crime had definitely taken place, because a man had been killed. Only it wasn’t a crime like any other, because the victim wasn’t a victim like any other.

“A good man!” echoed Maigret with a sort of anger.

Who would have had a reason to kill that good man?

It wouldn’t take much for him to start loathing good people.

You see what I mean about turning into a grouch?

The twist here is that there is no twist. You’ll be expecting some dark revelation about how the good people aren’t so good after all, but as it turns out they mostly are. Then the explanation for what happened only gets dropped in at the end in a tired manner, and it barely makes any sense. It also isn’t arrived at by any special power of deduction or observation, but just comes about when Maigret stops into the right bar to ask for a drink. I’m still hoping the series has a few more gems, but by this point Georges was mailing them in.

Maigret index