Georges Simenon
L'uomo che guardava passare i treni

Very likely that moment, Kees Popinga, had been eagerly awaiting it forever; a pretext to finally tell that bland life that had been progressively wearing him down for too long to go to hell. He simply didn't hope for it anymore. For forty years, he had meticulously torn off each week's days with a robotic manner and had accumulated them on the floor of his spacious villa, of which he was particularly proud. Days composed of repetitive situations, tied to society's proven rules, strict habits, practices from which it was now almost impossible to break free. It is for all these reasons that that night, in the warmth of an unsuitable inn, when the truth was thrown in his face, he, Kees Popinga, was happy. He was verbally wounded by the corrupt boss who, with exasperated clarity, unfolded unmistakably the inconsistency, the weakness, and fragility of his peaceful life made up of debts and future poverty. Years of diligent service and work about to collapse in an instant due to the employer's premeditated company failure, who now, staging a suicide, would leave the hot potato to the fool at hand. Him. Instead of falling into a hysterical nervous breakdown, instead of attempting to beat up, if not kill, that bastard son of a bitch who, after ruining him, dared to mock him... On the contrary, as if finally liberated from the fumes of a forty-year-long binge, Popinga felt for the first time free from burdens. A ship tied to the dock whose ropes, subjected to the assaults of a violent storm, finally break. He had smothered his passions for nothing and remained watching trains, others' lives, without the possibility of living it personally. But now, damn it, things would change, and no one would recognize him anymore.

Simenon in this current book from '38, the first of his that I read, vigorously tackles the struggle, the attempt to escape from a false, class-conscious, and cushioned world that clashes loudly with the human nature. An animal that initially trembles and writhes in the dense network of rules, written and unwritten, that limit its vital space up to the phlegmatic march of time's weariness that drains all hope and vitality.

Popinga, like every biped who treads the earth's crust, is convinced that he is not sufficiently appreciated for his qualities; he feels superior to the total mass, and the traumatic conversation with the boss gives him the strength he needed to find the courage to abandon everything and let himself be carried by instincts. Thus, he will live in chaotic Paris for a couple of free, passionate, and dangerous weeks in which the protagonist will feel almost omnipotent. He will understand that the world is made for those who act, for those who are not afraid of events and possible consequences, and who know how to take advantage of others' stupidity and risk everything.
From a respected but invisible person to a feared and sought-after public enemy, he will inject into his veins, like a drug addict, this overdose of success and notoriety. He will play an invisible chess game, well rendered by the author in the convoluted musings of his mind while weighing the countermeasures to be taken, with the police to avoid capture. When the newspapers almost no longer care about his story, downgraded to a sad and innocuous footnote, he will try to keep the attention alive; progressively understanding that he can no longer accept a return to anonymity and how much notoriety was the real engine of his actions.

The book alternates passages of realism and hard, granite-like toughness with tragicomic and absurd situations; it's pleasing because the protagonist of this sad adventure behaves outside the rules and laws not out of madness, but for cynical self-benefit and personal well-being. He realizes that his previous life made no more sense than that of a hamster condemned to spend days running on a wheel. Facing a society incapable of giving the right weight to his misadventures will progressively demolish him.
Finally possessing the key to reading the (non)sense of the everyday, he reads with disdain the editorials of journalists and experts, the testimonies of family and acquaintances, engaged in trying to justify those two weeks of real life and pure lucidity as a result of "amnesia", or "mental illness".

Popinga no longer knows how to react when the fact that his is a battle already lost becomes apparent. Knowing that he is aware of a truth that most of the population often ignores does not relieve the bitter taste of a pill he just can't swallow.