Georges Simenon - The Little Man from Archangel

Small towns have always had a certain suffocating closeness to them, particularly to an outsider. Everyone not only knows one another, but also their history, their families, their embarrassments, and, of course, their day-to-day activities. In a close-knit place like the Vieux-Marché, where Jonas Milk lives and works as a bookseller and stamp enthusiast, this is especially true. Though he has lived there for forty years, since he was all of two years old, he has never earned the 'tu' of the ordinary residents, and he is rarely referred to by his first name. Georges Simenon, an astonishingly prolific author, has created a small dark tale in 'The Little Man from Archangel', one that builds its tension through the ordinary nature of the citizens of the Vieux-Marché and their too-common reactions to an outsider.

Jonas Milk is a quiet, timid man who makes a little business in his bookstore, but who has a sizable collection of stamps, valued in the millions of francs. The stamps are a secret, though he has told his wife, Gina, who is two decades younger than him, unhappily married, and possesses a past filled with other men. In the town he is known and thought of fondly, but he is not really anyone's friend. Instead, he is something of a colleague, a likeable stranger perhaps. But he prefers this, because his true love is his stamps and his solitude.

The novel opens with Jonas lying to Fernand Le Bouc about his wife's whereabouts. She has gone, disappeared, and he doesn't know where and has no idea why. She has never been happy with him - indeed, they haven't kissed once throughout their two year marriage, though they occasionally engage in what could only be referred to as dispassionate intercourse. The night before she left to visit friends and now, gone. Jonas isn't too concerned - though he is concerned enough to lie - because Gina has left him like this before. The days pass and the lies mount, and then the police are contacted.

What is most interesting about The Little Man from Archangel is Jonas Milk's lack of concern about his wife's disappearance, his absence of emotion, and even his tendency to avoid thinking about it. In this, Jonas is not a compassionate figure, because we expect him to care a little more about his wife. As his past becomes clearer, however, we start to understand that Jonas' heart could never really be given to another. His past is sad, and precludes emotional engagement.

Jonas Milk is a refugee from Russia, his father a wealthy émigré who lost it all during the trip to France. Years later, his parents and siblings left him in the Vieux-Marché while they tried to return home, but he fears they were killed by the communists or sent to the gulags. On top of all this - and here the story turns dark - Jonas is a Jew, one who suspects that his race is the reason why he has never been properly accepted into the community, and why his wife is unable to love him. Jonas deeply misses his family, and has spent much time and thousands of francs searching for Russian and Soviet stamps. This is significant - a man who has lost his family, who is (he believes, though there are no explicit indications from the villagers) ostracised due to his religion, who has no real ties to the place other than a wife who dislikes him and who has left him before and seems to be leaving again - yet he does nothing more than collect Russian stamps. He could leave in a second, but he doesn't, and the question of why becomes paramount.

Jonas Milk is a lonely, sad man, and there is sympathy in that. We come to understand why Gina would leave him, though she is a recognisably 'bad' woman. Here, too, racial ugliness raises its head, for Jonas imagines her a few times with an unclean Arab man, though his evidence for such belief is slim. We see him engaging in the same behaviour that bothers him so much from his neighbours.

Nothing very much happens during the novel. We stay with Jonas as he goes to dinner and talks to the townsfolk, and that's about it, really. He goes to bed and rises in the morning, and at times he sells a book or looks at his stamps. Jonas is not a particularly active fellow, and neither is the novel. Instead, we are drawn slowly into the sadness that is his life, and the ambiguity that surrounds his wife's disappearance. There is, at times, the sense that if she were to leave, it really would be better for him. Jonas is a man unable and unwilling to be open with others. They see sadness and a bore, but what does Jonas see? "The truth is that he lived intensely, in his inner self, a rich and varied life." This is true, but it explains why his wife has gone.

Simenon wrote several books a year, every year, from roughly the age of twenty until his death. Setting aside his Maigret novels, an incredibly popular detective series, the vast output of Simenon is often concerned with fringe figured traveling through their own personal darkness. His understanding and sympathy for the introverted loner is strong, though often he gives them not the ending they deserve, but that best serves the bleakness of his vision. The Little Man from Archangel concludes in much the same way, which is to say that nobody finishes the novel happily. A dark and stormy gem.

Author	Georges Simenon
Title	The Little Man from Archangel (Original Title: Le Petit homme d'Arkhangelsk)
Nationality	Belgian
Publisher	Penguin
Published	1957 (English) 1956 (French)
Pages	159
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Book Depository ---Fishpond

See Also

Other titles by Simenon under review include:
---Maigret's Memoirs