Rating: 1/5
Review:
Soulless, purposeless and miserable
I didn’t like Three Bedrooms In Manhattan. I enjoy the Maigret
books very much but I found this a disappointment.
It’s fairly
plotless: a French actor has ended up in New York with little money
left (although enough for an awful lot of whiskey drinking) and meets
an enigmatic woman whose life story is hard to believe and they
embark on a strange few days of walking through New York, drinking,
lovemaking and the odd bout of misogynistic violence. It’s
intended to be an intense character study (something Simenon was
usually very good at) but it didn’t work for me at all. I didn’t
really believe in the characters and I certainly didn’t care about
them. There is a strong whiff of second-rate existentialist writing
here, in that everything is a bit bleak, the protagonist does
inexplicable things in an alienated way, and so on. It all seemed
soulless and miserable to no purpose and I’m afraid it’s a genre
that I can’t stand.
So, not for me,
then. I’m afraid I gave up about two-thirds of the way through
because I just couldn’t slog through any more. Give me a Maigret
any day, but I can’t recommend this.
(My thanks to
Penguin Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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