A New Lease of Life
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Une vie comme neuve (1951) is a 'roman dur' by Georges Simenon. Its English title is A New Lease of Life and A New Lease on Life. It is the story of an accountant plagued by an obsession with sin, who after being hit by a car, marries his nurse, begins a new life, but finds he cannot escape himself.
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Summary
Dudon leads a settled, secluded life as an bachelor. But this exemplary employee has some strange predilections: he likes to stay dirty in order to smell his own body odor; every Friday, he dips into his boss's cash register to go to "Madame Germaine's" to make love to a prostitute. Because of an overly mothering, formal, scrupulous upbringing, he is haunted by his sin, a mediocre sin, both gratuitous and necessary, a maniacal sin that he confesses every week in the confessional with morose delight.
One day, after his weekly sin, Dudon is hit by a car: it's the punishment of fate, long awaited. But there is also, in his hospital bed, a new life that opens for a purified man, "without age and without past". Now, nothing of his past matters for him anymore: he forgets his janitor, his goldfish, etc.. He finds himself in a mischievous and cheerful mood. From now on, the world smiles at him: he is in the hands of the best doctors, in the luxury hospital where the person responsible for his accident, the rich Lacroix-Gibet - of Gibet Wines - who fears to have been seen by his victim in the company of his mistress. The same Lacroix is going to propose to him to give up his modest job of accountant to occupy in his offices a position of responsibility, much better paid. Finally, he will have no difficulty in obtaining the favors of his nurse, the plump Anne-Marie, a sensual and instinctive good girl.
Once recovered, Dudon marries Anne-Marie, enters the Gibet company where he ruthlessly pursues the irregularities of the managers. Everything is easy for him: he lives with equality and good humor. But little by little, with the after-effects of his skull fracture, pains reappear: during a period of rest that is imposed on him, he finds himself in a crisis that sets him against his wife and makes him gloomy and unpleasant. From then on, his life will no longer be completely new. One day, he goes back to "Madame Germaine", then to the confessional... "His eyes had begun to look inward again."
Particular aspects of the novel
As in Aunt Jeanne, dirtiness, most often identified with a state of sin, forms an underlying motif of the novelistic theme: the confused aspiration to free oneself from a morbid hold (in this case, inherited from childhood).
The story is told from the point of view of the main character, whose impressions are expressed in an indirect style.
Medical revalidation is also the theme of The Bells of Bicêtre (1963).
Description of the work
Space and time frame
Space
Paris. References to Sancerre.
Time
Contemporary era.
Characters
Main character
Maurice Dudon. Accountant in a food company, then in charge of the control of the accountancy of managements in an important wine house. Single. 39 years old.
Other characters
- Anne-Marie, in her thirties, first nurse, then wife of Dudon
- Philippe Lacroix.
See also
