To the world, Marie is a simple girl—ugly, shy, frightened, and marked by a defect in one eye. At school, her classmates tell her she has the evil eye and avoid her; later in life, things improve slightly. She becomes well-liked for her work ethic, but it is the affection we give to someone who seems to exist outside time, outside sex, outside substance.
Yet the protagonist of Marie la strabica (Adelphi 2019, translated by Laura Frausin Guarino)—a novel Simenon wrote in 1951 during his long stay in the United States—is a far more complicated figure. Marie is compliant, but when the doctor-butcher (who has already disfigured her) insists on operating again, she becomes immovable. She can see evil, though not always judge it. She suffers betrayals without ever shedding a tear.
Among the many people who orbit around her is Sylvie, her exact opposite: beautiful, provocative, and above all determined to escape the poverty she knows too well. From childhood, she promises her friend: "When I'm rich, I'll take you as my maid, and every morning you'll do my hair." The two work together at a boardinghouse. But when Sylvie leaves the provinces to conquer Paris, Marie cannot help but follow. In the capital, however, "the cross-eyed girl" remains confined among those "marked by misfortune." For Sylvie, she becomes a burden. It almost angers Sylvie that her friend seems, calmly and without protest, to accept the mediocre existence to which she appears doomed.
Many years later, they meet again—and it is Sylvie who seeks out her old friend. She is arrogant as ever, but the ending, though bitter, is neither predictable nor simple. This is hardly new in Simenon's novels, which Adelphi has been reissuing for some time. What strikes the contemporary reader most, though, is how disability itself is portrayed. We might wish to call it dated—especially in the passages where Louis appears, a tall boy with epilepsy and intellectual disability. But it probably is not dated at all. Because we still look at disability without truly seeing it. Without, that is, granting it any complexity at all.