The author of “A Simple Story” often makes us laugh, but he himself laughs last, laughs at how cleverly he tricked us. In his “Simple Story,” he often seems to laugh at the characters portrayed in it, laughing at us at the same time. “You, my readers,” he seems to say, “think the people I write about are comical. But are you sure that you yourself are not getting into trouble? We have to approach the heroes of his books with the standards of the twentieth century, and they are perhaps just as absurd and funny, and perhaps even more absurd, than the heroes themselves. Undoubtedly, Agnon is a great master of fooling, but it is not always clear who is being fooled.