The People Opposite (Romans Durs)

A foreign consul confronts fear, surveillance, and moral paralysis in Soviet-era Batumi.

From the moment he arrives in the remote Soviet port town of Batumi, the Turkish consul Adil Bey finds himself plunged into an atmosphere of isolation and intimidation. The old rules of diplomacy seem to mean nothing. His fellow consuls are dismissive, even hostile, while Soviet officials merely smile and delay. Even as crowds of hungry petitioners swarm the consulate, his every request seems to disappear into a bureaucratic void. As arrests, rumors, and unexplained deaths accumulate, Bey begins to grasp that in Batumi, power operates invisibly, and that good intentions offer no defense.

Written after Georges Simenon’s own journey through the Soviet Union, The People Opposite is both a slow-burn political novel and a devastating portrait of psychological suffocation. In sparse, exacting prose, Simenon captures the erosion of selfhood under constant surveillance and the moral ambiguities surfaced by a system in which responsibility is endlessly deferred.