Act of Passion, by Georges Simenon

Another of this prolific author's romans durs seeping with brooding misery. One can only hope that as a leech draws blood from its host, so to will Simenon's work absorb our own little miseries. Maybe that's why I like them? Echoes of Camus' The Stranger and even, at times, Doestoevsky's Notes from Underground decorate this confessional tale delivered in a letter to a court official after a guilty verdict of murder. The murderer takes us along as he chronicles his life and slowly loses his sanity, all the while convinced of that sanity, like most mad people are. After all, a mad person's reality is no less real to them than it is for us. I particularly like how tidy and non-convoluted this tale is. The murderer is a doctor who becomes abusive to his lover, a young, promiscuous, woman he meets in a train station. He wants to return her to a purer state before she grew up and started sleeping with men. Perhaps his obsession with her is wrapped up in his profession as a healer. Perhaps he is obsessed with her because he can control her in ways that he cannot control his wife. Or, perhaps, because he had a controlling mother. The physical violence is his poorly evolved way of dealing with the conflicts within him. The rationalization of that violence is a manifestation of the intellectually evolved, yet warped, way the mind deals with conflict. Psychic blindness and madness may be the result - clearly so in this case.