The Move

"The Move" bears witness to Simenon's gift for renewal. It is a suspense story which shows the constants of human behavior in the setting of new urban life. An average office employee on the way up decides to make a dramatic change; from a dingy apartment in the heart of Paris he moves with his wife and teenage son to one of the latest housing developments on the outskirts of the city, a no man's land of withering neutrality. The apartment house, for all its gloss and marble, is anything but soundproof, and a particularly thin partition between his and the next-door bedroom makes Emile first an inadvertent and later an avid eavesdropper on the strange nocturnal doings and conversations of his neighbors. Partly disgusted, partly fascinated, he becomes the secret sharer of their most intimate confidences. His curiosity irrevocably stirred, he is carried away headlong from his humdrum blinkered existence into troubled waters.....