Foreign fields: Boyd Tonkin chooses his favourite shorter classics in translation

If I had a rouble or a euro for every reader who fulfilled their lockdown promise to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Proust my bank account would hardly grow by a single penny. Duty, guilt and pride never made the pages turn more swiftly, whatever a book’s length. Almost all vows to catch up on doorstopper classics from the global canon will have failed to outlast the fallen blossoms. Yet you might more realistically blend discovery and delight by exploring some of the smaller miracles of great fiction in translation.

Freshly completed, in first-rate new translations, the 75 volumes of Georges Simenon’s Maigret mysteries bear witness to a Penguin Modern Classics project of majestic scope and unflagging quality. Chaste, chiselled prose; piercing psychology; surgical scene-setting — in Paris and provincial France — of keyhole precision; gnawing moral complexities: a multi-course feast awaits newcomers to the Belgian master.

Another French-language purveyor of concentrated tastes on smallish plates, Colette may also prove addictive.