The Little Man from Archangel (Romans Durs)

In this minor-key masterpiece, a gentle bookseller seeks only obscurity until, buffeted by fate and misunderstood by his supposed friends, he makes a shocking decision.

Diffident, bespectacled Jonas Milk, a bookseller and stamp collector, has always lived unobtrusively. His Russian Jewish family of origin was deracinated, or worse, during the world wars. But Jonas found peace, and a kind of belonging, in his small French town. At age thirty-eight, he even converted to Catholicism and married a high-spirited younger woman, Gina.

If Gina is unfaithful, who is Jonas to object? And, one summer, when she fails to come home for days—well, that’s nothing new. Except this time, almost accidentally, he lies about her whereabouts to his neighbors. Suddenly, he falls under suspicion. It is shattering: for all his best efforts to fit in, he’s evidently seen as an outsider, a foreigner. Even, perhaps, a murderer. With The Little Man from Archangel, a rueful masterpiece wrought with a miniaturist’s precision, Georges Simenon scales the peak of his gifts as a storyteller of rare complexity and acuity.