translated from the French by Jean Stewart and published in 1964
Félix Allard is a typical Simenon protagonist of his romans durs oeuvre. He writes about ordinary people living unremarkable lives going about their daily business, bothered though by petty grievances, regrets and feelings of uselessness. They are like extras on a film set, but Simenon takes them, gives them a rich history and inner life, and tells their story.
48 year old Allard works in a Parisian bookshop owned by a former Madam of a brothel, now confined to her bed. He lives in a small apartment with his dog Bib as his sole companion. As the novel opens, he is contemplating ending his life, and has taken to writing in a notebook to record his last days. It soon materialises that he has been in prison for sometime, that he has been married with children, but details emerge only gradually.
It’s a minor Simenon novel, published twice but now long out of print. The beauty of it though is in his protagonist, Félix Allard, to whom Simenon gives dignity, a tragic character, but one who soon earns sympathy. It seems a pity that so few people will actually read such wonderful novels as this, one reason being, that he just wrote so many of them..
My GoodReads score 4 / 5
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