Frederick's Reviews > Tropic Moon

I read the New York Review Of Books edition, which has the translation by Marc Romano.
LE COUP DE LUNE was published in 1933, during the first prolific burst of Maigret novels. It is not part of that series, it being a stand-alone story of French colonial life. This novel, like most of Simenon's books, is brief, but then again, so was Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. Like that work, it packs a wallop. Graham Greene would explore much the same territory over the next few decades. Having read many books by Joseph Conrad and all the novels of Graham Greene, I can say that Simenon, in TROPIC MOON, offers a perfect distillation of the themes Conrad and Greene dealt with. The message is clear: White Europeans raped and murdered people of color is distant lands and the people back home in Europe were complicit.
TROPIC MOON is unambiguous about this.
While I do not read French, I have read seven of Simenon's books in translation and have to say that Marc Romano achieves a uniformity of tone I have not found in the translations of the other Simenon books I've read. This may be because Simenon was extremely focused in this book, but I have a feeling Romano is an exceptional translator.