Betty (Romans Durs)
About this ebook
Expelled from her family home in the provinces after a scandalous affair, Betty arrives in Paris with empty pockets, no plan, and a powerful thirst for drink. In a seedy bar on the Champs-Élysées, she meets Laure, an older woman clinging to scraps of respectability. Their uneasy cohabitation offers temporary shelter, but at the same time sharpens Betty’s sense of her own failure. As Betty drinks more heavily, the boundaries between past and present blur—memories of her childhood, her parents, and the incident that led to her disgrace surface in fragments, exposing a deep well of resentment, shame, and self-loathing.
One of Georges Simenon’s bleakest and most uncompromising psychological portraits, Betty charts a woman’s self-destruction with relentless clarity, offering a devastating portrait of urban loneliness, class resentment, and the cruelties inflicted on the dispossessed by a numb and uncaring society.
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About the author
Georges Simenon (1903–1989) was born in Liège, Belgium. An intrepid traveler with a profound interest in people, Simenon strove on and off the page to understand—and not to judge—the human condition in all its shades. His books include the Inspector Maigret series and a richly varied body of wider work united by its evocative power, its economy of means, and its penetrating psychological insight. He is among the most widely read writers in the global canon.
Ros Schwartz has translated numerous works of fiction and nonfiction from French, including a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance. The recipient of a number of awards, she was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009 and received the Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence in 2017.
