‘The Cat’ by Georges Simenon

When I need a quick, satisfying read, I pick up one of George Simenon’s crime stories about Inspector Jules Maigret. Between 1930 and 1975, The Belgian author wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring the French detective.

Most detective fiction relies on strong plots, but not the Maigret novels. Simenon would begin writing without knowing whodunnit and typically complete each novel in less than two weeks. On both counts, it shows. The stories are often confusing or resolve abruptly in the final few pages. But it doesn’t matter, because what they lack in plot, they make up for by masterfully developing atmosphere, character and setting.

As well as his incredibly popular detective fiction, Simenon also wrote literary fiction, books he called ‘roman durs’, or ‘hard novels’. After years of reading Maigret, I recently picked up my first roman durs, a 1967 novel called The Cat, reissued this year by Penguin in a new English translation.

The Cat is a bleak and harrowing story about an elderly married couple who punish and torture each other, living in the same house without speaking, stalking each other around their neighbourhood, and devising new methods of harassment. And yet, they need each other. The husband, who is the protagonist, escapes for less than a fortnight to live in a place where he is happier but cannot help himself from returning to his wife who he suspects of having poisoned his pet cat.

The Maigret novels often represent the darker side of human nature, containing depraved, desperate and cruel characters. But Inspector Maigret is always there to provide a counterbalance. He might be gruff, but he is intensely moral —empathetic to all whom he encounters and firm in his ethics. The Cat is what a Maigret novel might be like without its protagonist — without a hero to expose and correct the sordid affairs he encounters.

The Maigret novels look outward. Most are set in Paris, vividly and romantically represented, in cafes, streets, hotels, and along the banks of the Seine. Normally, the first few pages give us some impression of the weather. Take the opening paragraph of 1942’s Cecile is Dead:

The pipe that Detective Chief Inspector Maigret lit on coming out of his door in Boulevard Richard-Lenoir was even more delicious than usual. The first fog of the season was as pleasant a surprise as the first snow for children, especially when it was not that nasty yellowish fog you see on certain winter days, but a misty, milky vapour with halos of light in it. The air was fresh. The ends of your fingers and your nose tingled on a day like this, and the soles of your shoes clicked smartly on the road.

The Cat, by comparison, is inward facing and claustrophobic. The protagonist is trapped both in his own mind and in the apartment he shares with his wife. We are told:

Curiously, as he grew older, he had become almost insensitive to smells. Nor did he see the streets with the same eye as in the past, when they had offered a constantly changing spectacle which never ceased to fascinate him.

Back then, when he immersed himself in the crowd, he had the impression of being part of a whole, of being involved in a sort of symphony of which each note, each splash of colour, each puff of warm or cold air, enchanted him.

He couldn’t have said when the change had taken place. Probably little by little, as he grew older, without noticing it.

The Cat’s protagonist loses something that Maigret never loses, even in the novels set during his retirement — his connection to the world.

The Cat is a portrait of a cruel and self-centred man in decline, growing old and coming apart both physically and psychologically. (In that, it reminded me of some other novels originally published in French, those of Michel Houellebecq.)

If you’re new to Simenon, start by picking up one of the Maigret books. But once you’ve spent a bit of time with the Inspector as he darts around Paris downing beers and solving murders, you might want to read The Cat for Simenon’s portrait of the alienated human soul.

‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë

Speaking of novels about toxic relationships… Mine isn’t the only copy of Wuthering Heights I’ve seen on my morning train commute in recent months — I clearly wasn’t alone in having picked it up ahead of the Emerald Fennell film adaptation. Online discourse seems to operate in binaries, encouraging us to label the cultural objects we encounter as either totally transcendent or artistically and morally bankrupt. Fennell’s film was neither, but it was fine — a satisfying-enough way to spend a couple of hours in the cinema. Part of the reason many critics seem to have been frustrated by the film is because it is so different in scope to the novel. The film fixates on romantic yearning and obsession. These are key in the book, though go much less requited. But the novel is much more expansive, comparable to Shakespeare in its extraordinary range. Through its Babushka-doll structure — with narrators inside narrators inside narrators — Wuthering Heights becomes many things, including a horror story filled with grotesque violence, a study of abuse and the ways it reverberates through generations, and a speculation upon what it might mean to die. Good luck fitting all that and more into a single film.

If I were forced to rank the versions of Wuthering Heights I’ve engaged with in recent weeks:

1. The novel

2. The Kate Bush song

3. The Charli XCX album

4. Emerald Fennell’s film

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‘Strangers I Know’ by Claudia Durastanti

First published in Italian as La Straniera in 2019, Strangers I Know has been described by its author Claudia Durastanti as a “non-fiction novel”. The book occupies a space between fiction and non-fiction, and its narrator seems to live her life in a similar in-between zone. Like her father, she over-identifies with the characters in films, beginning to act like them once the film is over. “From him I learned to love the moment a move starts seeping off the screen, washing over you, so when you leave the theater you’ve unwillingly crossed a threshold,” the narrator says. She tells us how for years of her adolescence she writes a fake diary, “an accurate record of falsification”, tricking her snooping mother into thinking she’s addicted to cigarettes. In the final chapter, she shows some pages of the book we’re reading to her mother, who tells her she’s got it “all wrong” and makes some corrections to the family history we encountered earlier in the book. Throughout, it’s clear Durastanti is writing about her own life, but she makes no secret of being an unreliable narrator.

The novel might encourage us to doubt which details are factual, but in doing so captures the truth of how an identity is made: of experiences that become stories and memories that become mythologies, many of which are inherited and none of which can be fully trusted.

I picked up the 2022 English translation by Elizabeth Harris, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, in a bookstore in Florence, hunting for some Italian literature to read in English. I read most of Strangers I Know on a trip much closer to home, lying on the beaches of Rottnest Island, with the fierce West Australian sun pounding down on my bare back until I got so hot I had to put the book down and dive back into the ocean.

It felt like an appropriate novel to have picked up in a foreign city and read on an entirely different trip, because it’s a book about being in between places. The narrator grows up going back and forth from Italy to America, never entirely at home in either, and later moves to London, a place she’s romanticised but struggles to adapt to. The novel gives the sense that the world has been flattened. The southern Italian village life we get a glimpse of in the narrator’s telling of her family history has faded by the time she spends her teenage years there. At university, she goes on to read anthropological accounts of the region, but finds them outdated, telling us: “A whole lot had changed since the fifties: the rules had changed, but since they were a lot closer to the rules American teenagers followed, anthropologists found them boring”. The novel shows how technology, globalisation, and consumer culture have taken away something of the character of places. The result, for the narrator at least, is a kind of alienation. Through literature, work, love, and friendship, she can overcome it, but a sense of disconnection never seems far away.

Strangers I Know also felt like an appropriate novel to read in translation. The protagonist’s parents are both deaf, meaning translation and miscommunication are ever-present in family life. The narrator finds it exhausting to try and communicate with her mother. “It takes physical effort, this affection, this tie that binds us,” she says. And yet, she continues. Translation is a struggle, but one that can open possibilities.

Strangers I Know is an in-between novel: in between genres, places, and languages. At one point, the narrator tells us:

These days, it’s almost impossible to get lost in London, and not just because there’s a GPS on every cell phone: every interstitial space in the city, anywhere you might cross into a new district, has a map on the corner. And there’s always a dot showing ‘You are here.’ … What space is left for desire when everything is so transparent?

It’s interstitial spaces that are being squeezed out as the world becomes smaller, and these are the spaces the novel dwells in, creating plenty of room to explore desire, and mystery, the fluidity of identity, and the ways our attempts at communication will fail at times and succeed at others.

If you’ve received this by email, it’s because you signed up for the newsletter on my website, which I’m now moving here to Substack. If you don’t want to stick around, no hard feelings — there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. But if you want to read about what I think is worth paying attention to, you’re in the right place.

First up: some lessons I learnt by reading Simone Weil and taking a break from social media.

I’m addicted to my phone.

These days, that’s a mundane thing to say. Who among us isn’t?

But it’s also a serious admission that I’m wasting two of the most precious things I have — my time and my attention.

Like most people, I carry around a device that is a bit like a slot machine, a bit like a television, a bit like a shop, and a bit like a CCTV camera. At any time of day or night, I can use it to access a virtually endless stream of entertainment, advertisements, pornography, or opinions. I can talk to it on almost any topic, and it will talk right back, never getting sick of the conversation.

I need my smartphone for my job. I can’t give it up, and I don’t want to either. I value the convenience and connectivity it allows me. Switching back to a dumbphone or going phoneless is not for me. I prefer moderation to abstinence.

The technology itself is miraculous. The economic model, less so.

Tech companies design their apps to maximise the amount of time we spend on them. The limited resource of human attention — which platforms, advertisers, and creators all vie for — has become the basis of a whole new economy.

But attention has value beyond what an attention economy can capture.

To understand how to think about attention in the age of the smartphone, we can turn to Simone Weil, the twentieth-century philosopher and mystic. For her, attention was a moral virtue and a spiritual practice.

Weil worked as a teacher, both in schools and among working-class people. She believed the essential purpose of education was to develop the faculty of attention. The specific subjects a student studied — mathematics, language, or anything else — were far less important to Weil than the attention devoted to them.

“Every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit,” Weil writes.1

For Weil, the ultimate purpose of this training of attention is to direct it to the divine. To her, the highest form of attention is prayer, “the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God.”2

She also believes we should direct our attention to those who are suffering and alienated: “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.”.3

If Weil is right, and paying attention is a discipline that can enrich us spiritually and morally, then wasting or degrading our capacity for attention damages us at the deepest level.

And when digital platforms mine our attention for profit, they wound our spirits.

I used to be better at paying attention. Something fractured for me around 2019. Before then, I’d meditated daily for years. Most weeks, I’d read a whole book. Now, those practices happen in fits and starts.

The break in my attention span coincided with a shift in vocation. I left high school teaching to dedicate myself to full-time political activism. I became frantically involved in these efforts, responding to and trying to shape headlines and social feeds. I was so convinced of the importance of my work that I prioritised it above just about everything else.

Around the time of this personal shift, the world changed, too. The pandemic tied us closer to our screens, and platform algorithms seemed to become supercharged, spookily anticipating what would keep us hooked.

More recently, I got to a point where I was feeling exhausted. My work and my leisure were both mostly happening online. My faculty for attention was shot. I craved deep immersion, but I felt instead like I was skimming over the surface of things. Something had to change.

I still struggle with my relationship to my phone. But in recent months, I’ve got closer to something that feels healthier.

The best thing I did was take a break. In October, I spent three weeks in Italy. At the airport, I deleted work-related and social media apps. During the trip, I used my phone for travel research, maps, payments, and music, but little else. When I got back, I only re-downloaded some of the apps and disabled notifications for others. I was calmer, more present.

It’s easy to find other places to direct your attention while on holiday. While I did reflexively reach for the apps a few times, there was so much to see and do that I didn’t feel any lack. Of course, not everyone can go overseas for three weeks to unplug. Those with means are more easily able to withdraw and guard their attention. Others must stay connected to make ends meet. I suspect an attention inequality is emerging that mirrors other ways our societies are divided.

The break helped me reset, but the harder part was working out how to reintroduce some potential distractions without getting lost in them. I consciously adjusted my media diet — cancelling many online subscriptions and reading more in print rather than online. I also began to spend more of my online time on my laptop, rather than my phone, which feels less mindless and prevents me from getting sucked in as deeply.

I’ve now got an app on my phone that only lets me look at social media for 15 minutes a day — enough that I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I need the hard limit. I know that if I were relying on willpower alone, my screen time would ramp right back up.

Simone Weil is wary of willpower. “We have to try and cure our faults by attention and not by will,” she writes.4 She believed paying attention, while not without effort, was different from the kind of strained effort where we “tighten up our muscles and set our jaws”.5

“If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself,” she writes.6 In her view, the direction we look is more important than how intensely we exert ourselves to get there.

For Weil, God is “the good” that attention should ultimately be directed towards. But when our capacity for attention is so degraded, a starting point might be to turn our minds to the things that build it and expand it, rather than break it down: to books and beauty and loved ones, rather than the distractions of the attention economy.

That involves consciously choosing where we direct our attention and arranging our lives to make those choices easier to follow through on.

For me, writing helps. According to Weil, there is “a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.”7 In that spirit, writing becomes a practice to hone the faculty of attention.

Trying to fix my own eroded capacity for attention seems important — but personal circumstances are only a small part of the picture. Technological, cultural, and political factors are more significant — and harder to respond to alone.

It’s possible smartphones might come to look quaint. Tech companies are racing to develop wearable AI devices like pins and glasses. The concept of screen time could become redundant, while our lives become even more technologically mediated. Before then, we should begin working on how best to protect what is sacred about paying attention.

I’ll be exploring how to do that on this Substack — as well as pointing to some things I think are worth paying attention to.

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