The Hazel Wood is Still Green

4 hrs. 15 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Georges Simenon

Narrator Shniferson

Description

To the retired wealthy banker Perre-Latour in the novel “And Yet the Acorn Is Green,” life seems lonely and meaningless. Once, it was full of affairs: there were friends, brilliant women—everything that money can give a person. His apartments are on the Place Vendôme in Paris—the square of luxurious hotels and expensive jewel shops. Yet nothing can replace the lost joys of simple human companionship, the warmth, the sense of being needed by someone, apart from oneself. Renewal becomes possible only when the ability to feel another person’s pain returns—when the desire to be useful to other people appears. It doesn’t come right away. Perre-Latour learns that faraway America, his first wife Pat is dying in near poverty. His granddaughter Natalie gives birth to a child, forever turning away from the child’s father. Pat’s death and the difficult situation Natalie finds herself in force the old banker to look at life in a new way; now, there is room for him among people as well. Perre-Latour decides to adopt Natalie’s child and give him his own name. “Well then! I have another son now! And he will live with me, in my house. I don’t just feel joy, it’s as if I’ve been freed… I remember my walk along the Marne, I remember… and a phrase that came to mind without my meaning to: ‘And yet the acorn is green…’”