The Man Who Watched Trains Go By by Georges Simenon
Published 1938 · 62,277 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Crime Fiction, Psychological Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is The Man Who Watched Trains Go By to read?
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By scores 36 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 25 out of 100
- Simenon's characteristically plain vocabulary — short words, flat sentences, nothing decorative. The prose matches Popinga's habit of bookkeeping: precise, minimal, stripped of flourish. This is one of the most accessible literary styles in twentieth-century European fiction.
- Sentence structure: 25 out of 100
- Declarative sentences that move fast, like the trains Popinga watches. Simenon famously wrote each novel in seven to ten days, and the syntax carries that velocity — no lingering, no subordinate clause hedging, just action following action.
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- The psychological portrait of Popinga is delivered through behavior and event, not theorized directly. The novel's ideas about bourgeois identity and the illusion of freedom are shown — Popinga writes letters to newspapers correcting accounts of his crimes — rather than stated. Readers infer the diagnosis from the symptoms.
- Information density: 40 out of 100
- A short novel (under 200 pages) that covers a lot of ground — Groningen, Amsterdam, Paris — and a rapid psychological disintegration. Each chapter is compressed. Simenon includes the police investigation running parallel to Popinga's flight, requiring readers to track two narrative threads.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Third-person narration stays close to Popinga's perspective, but the gap between his self-regard and his actual behavior creates an ironic distance the reader must navigate. Popinga believes he has a 'cool head'; the reader sees the deterioration. This gap is the engine of the novel's effect.
- Symbolic density: 35 out of 100
- The trains are the central symbol — movement, escape, the life not lived — and Simenon deploys them deliberately. Popinga's red notebook, in which he records his own crimes, carries symbolic weight. Otherwise the novel keeps symbolism subordinate to its crisp realism.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Popinga's letters to the newspapers — insisting the press has gotten his crimes wrong, demanding to be properly understood — are the novel's most devastating irony. He presents himself as a superior rational actor; the reader watches him unravel. The irony is understated in tone and crushing in effect.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- Popinga is caught and institutionalized — the external resolution is clear. What remains unresolved is the question the novel turns on: was Popinga always this person, or did the revelation of his employer's fraud unmask something the respectability had buried? Simenon does not answer.
- Structural complexity: 20 out of 100
- Linear picaresque following one character from Groningen through Amsterdam to Paris. The parallel police investigation adds a second track but the form is simple. Simenon's signature: maximum psychological complexity delivered through minimum structural complexity.
How The Man Who Watched Trains Go By is regarded
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By holds a literary regard score of 58 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.