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Dirty Snow
Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snow opens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until finally there is nowhere to go.
Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as "one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right." In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Simenon maps a no man's land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction—and redemption, perhaps, as well—by forces beyond its control.
Hans Koning has described Dirty Snow as "one of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right." In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Simenon maps a no man's land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction—and redemption, perhaps, as well—by forces beyond its control.
244 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1948
About the author
Georges Simenon
1,882 books1,921 followersGeorges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903 – 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret.
Although he never resided in Belgium after 1922, he remained a Belgian citizen throughout his life.
Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, capable of writing 60 to 80 pages per day. His oeuvre includes nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms. Altogether, about 550 million copies of his works have been printed.
He is best known, however, for his 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Maigret. The first novel in the series, Pietr-le-Letton, appeared in 1931; the last one, Maigret et M. Charles, was published in 1972. The Maigret novels were translated into all major languages and several of them were turned into films and radio plays. Two television series (1960-63 and 1992-93) have been made in Great Britain.
During his "American" period, Simenon reached the height of his creative powers, and several novels of those years were inspired by the context in which they were written (Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946), Maigret à New York (1947), Maigret se fâche (1947)).
Simenon also wrote a large number of "psychological novels", such as La neige était sale (1948) or Le fils (1957), as well as several autobiographical works, in particular Je me souviens (1945), Pedigree (1948), Mémoires intimes (1981).
In 1966, Simenon was given the MWA's highest honor, the Grand Master Award.
In 2005 he was nominated for the title of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian). In the Flemish version he ended 77th place. In the Walloon version he ended 10th place.
Although he never resided in Belgium after 1922, he remained a Belgian citizen throughout his life.
Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, capable of writing 60 to 80 pages per day. His oeuvre includes nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms. Altogether, about 550 million copies of his works have been printed.
He is best known, however, for his 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Commissaire Maigret. The first novel in the series, Pietr-le-Letton, appeared in 1931; the last one, Maigret et M. Charles, was published in 1972. The Maigret novels were translated into all major languages and several of them were turned into films and radio plays. Two television series (1960-63 and 1992-93) have been made in Great Britain.
During his "American" period, Simenon reached the height of his creative powers, and several novels of those years were inspired by the context in which they were written (Trois chambres à Manhattan (1946), Maigret à New York (1947), Maigret se fâche (1947)).
Simenon also wrote a large number of "psychological novels", such as La neige était sale (1948) or Le fils (1957), as well as several autobiographical works, in particular Je me souviens (1945), Pedigree (1948), Mémoires intimes (1981).
In 1966, Simenon was given the MWA's highest honor, the Grand Master Award.
In 2005 he was nominated for the title of De Grootste Belg (The Greatest Belgian). In the Flemish version he ended 77th place. In the Walloon version he ended 10th place.
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February 7, 2024
In the world of the novel, Georges Simenon was a Mozart. He quit school for good as a teenager, never participated in a writing workshop, never enrolled in a writing program and never attended a writing class. With his innate ear for language and dialogue, eye for detail and feel for storytelling, all he needed was four dozen freshly sharpened pencils lined up on his desk and a 'Do Not Disturb' sign to hang on his door. And presto – a first-rate novel written at fever pitch in two weeks. Goodness, what some writers wouldn’t give to have a fraction of his talent.
After ten years of writing dime store potboilers, Simenon decided to get more serious and started writing his Detective Maigret novels. A few years after pumping out detective novels, again Simenon decided to become even more serious and thus began writing what he sometimes characterized as romans durs, that is, “straight novels” or “hard novels,” meaning hard on the reader. P.D. James termed these Simenon third phase books as “dark novels.” Personally, I like the sound of all three together: straight, hard and dark. And let me tell you folks, Dirty Snow is exactly that - straight as in a straight psychological study (a mile away from detective fiction), hard as in very hard on the reader and dark as in the deep recesses of the human psyche.
Simenon’s novels are nearly always strict point-of-view narratives where readers see people and unfolding events only as the main character sees them. With Dirty Snow, the novel’s main character is a burly eighteen-year-old by the name of Frank Friedmaier, a despicable lout if there ever was one.
The novel isn’t written in first-person but it’s a close cousin – in each and every scene it’s as if we are standing directly behind Frank, gazing over his brawny, swinish shoulder. Judging this novel set in an unnamed European city under World War II-type foreign military occupation as hard on the reader would be an understatement; anyone opening the book’s pages had better be prepared for a story that’s tough to swallow; actually, on further reflection, make that extremely tough to swallow.
At various points in the narrative Dirty Snow reminded me of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (random youth violence), Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (eerie dystopia), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (state sponsored fear) and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (nightmarish interrogations). Likewise Albert Camus’ 1945 novel, The Stranger, written three year prior to Simenon’s, in the sense Dirty Snow is coated with existential alienation as snow in the novel is coated with dirt, and also is structurally similar to The Stranger in that it is divided into two distinct parts – Frank living on the outside and Frank shut up on the inside.
My strong sense is if Georges Simenon didn’t write all those potboilers and Detective Maigret novels and only wrote a few of his romans durs, then Dirty Snow would be studied and discussed alongside such classics of existentialism as The Stranger and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. Now I can see why George Simenon thought himself worthy of the Nobel Prize and resented publishers and literati who labeled him a hack catering to the clamoring, detective fiction-loving rabble.
In the first chapter we learn Frank links sex with violence and feels inferior to other slightly older men who have committed murders, thus Frank plans to murder his first man, a fat officer in the army of occupation known as the Eunuch, who is drinking in a bar, murder him with a knife that very evening as something akin to a rite of passage. We also come to understand Frank has an odd relationship with an older man, his neighbor, Gerhardt Holst, a man we might infer is a father figure for Frank.
Frank waits in the snow of the back alley, knife at the ready, waiting for the Eunuch to walk out of the bar. Just at that moment Holst walks down the alley. Holst would never see him pressed up against the wall but Frank coughs to make sure Holst knows he is there. Frank reflects: “Of course it wasn’t because of Holst that he was going to kill the Eunuch. That was already decided. It was just that, at that moment, his act had made no sense. It had been almost a joke, a childish prank. What was it he had said? Like losing his virginity.” Let us recall how in traditional societies the rite of passage from boyhood to manhood does not happen in isolation but is a community event witnessed by older men. Perhaps Frank yearns for such a communal passage.
The plot quickly thickens. I highly recommended this penetrating existential novel published by New York Review Books since there is a most insightful ten page Afterward written by William T. Vollmann. Afterward rather than Introduction is ideal in this case - under the assumption one has already read Dirty Snow, Vollmann critiques the novel in detail without risking giving anything away. At one point Vollmann observes: “Here is Simenon’s genius. Frank wants to be recognized. He wants to be known. He scarcely knows himself, or anything else worth knowing. But if he can somehow stand revealed to the gaze of the Other, then maybe he will achieve some sort of realization. Don’t you and I want to be more real than we are? And wouldn’t it be convenient if somebody else could help us get there?” I hope your literary appetite has been whetted. Again, highly recommended.
Georges Simenon - The first cup of coffee. Awake at 6:00, he prepares it himself and drinks it installed at his machine. He gives himself until 9:00 to write a whole chapter. He works only by electric light.
March 6, 2012
- Ladies and gentlemen, watch carefully. Here's Frank, a young punk who lives in his mother's brothel in occupied France. He lies, drinks, steals, does black market business with the German officers, commits murder just for fun. Yes, feel free to touch him, he fucks his mother's girls every night while treating them like shit and is also trying to seduce the 16 year old virgin who lives across the hall.
Are you still watching... you may check that there is nothing up my sleeve... and now, using only sparse, descriptive prose, I will transform him into a universal symbol of human suffering and redemption that will remind you of L'Etranger, King Lear and Crime and Punishment, but still has a character all its own.
Sir, I understand your scepticism. You don't think it's possible, but... ABRACADABRA!!!
The audience stare in disbelief. A lone voice from the back asks plaintively:
- Bloody hell, how did Simenon do that?
Are you still watching... you may check that there is nothing up my sleeve... and now, using only sparse, descriptive prose, I will transform him into a universal symbol of human suffering and redemption that will remind you of L'Etranger, King Lear and Crime and Punishment, but still has a character all its own.
Sir, I understand your scepticism. You don't think it's possible, but... ABRACADABRA!!!
The audience stare in disbelief. A lone voice from the back asks plaintively:
- Bloody hell, how did Simenon do that?
February 10, 2021
3.5 stars
“For Frank, killing his first man at the age of nineteen is a loss of virginity no more remarkable than the first. And as with the first, it is unpremeditated. It just happens. It is as if a moment comes when it is both indispensable and natural to make a decision that has in fact been made long before.”
Frank Friedmaier is a loathsome individual, lacking compassion and any sort of respect for others, in particular for women. The story takes place in Europe in an unnamed (as far as I could ever tell) German-occupied city. His mother owns a brothel that is frequented by the occupying officers, enabling the two to live in relative comfort compared to the other tenants of their apartment building. Frank spends his time bullying his mother, spying on the customers and the young girls, having sex with whichever girl happens to be working there that month, and going out to drink with his comrades, detestable characters much like him. We perceive that he has always yearned for a father figure while at the same time desiring to be fully accepted and recognized as a man. When he commits a crime as a rite of passage into manhood, things go spiraling out of his control. He then toys with fate.
“Now he could have said, “Fate!” Because he wanted fate to take an interest in him; he had done everything to force its hand and he continued to defy it from morning to night.”
Frank could stand with the likes of such anti-heroes as Roskolnikov of Crime and Punishment and Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley. Both Roskolnikov and Frank commit a murderous act without any sense of initial regret. It’s been at least a decade since I’ve read Dostoyevsky, but I’d venture to say that Frank isn’t haunted by the same moral dilemmas or the burden of guilt. Well, he may in fact regret one action, but he won’t go on to be tormented to the end of days to the same depth as did Roskolnikov. This is where Frank would be better likened to Tom Ripley then perhaps. While Patricia Highsmith managed to make me actually root for Tom, I couldn’t muster up any misplaced loyalty towards Frank, however. My sympathy came much too late for him and by then the book was practically at an end.
Frank will soon learn that we all pay a price for our actions. When he commits the one act for which he seems to finally despise himself, his remorse comes too late. The last third of the book was the best in my opinion. A clearer understanding of Frank’s mind as well as the psychological tension turned this around for me quite a lot. Still, I couldn’t help comparing this to those other two books I’ve mentioned. As a result, this just felt like a lesser novel. My expectation to align myself on Frank’s dark side just didn’t happen here. Not Simenon’s fault. I blame it on Dostoyevsky and Highsmith!
“Frank has done what he wanted to do. He has turned the corner. He has looked on the other side. He didn’t see what he had been expecting to see.”
“For Frank, killing his first man at the age of nineteen is a loss of virginity no more remarkable than the first. And as with the first, it is unpremeditated. It just happens. It is as if a moment comes when it is both indispensable and natural to make a decision that has in fact been made long before.”
Frank Friedmaier is a loathsome individual, lacking compassion and any sort of respect for others, in particular for women. The story takes place in Europe in an unnamed (as far as I could ever tell) German-occupied city. His mother owns a brothel that is frequented by the occupying officers, enabling the two to live in relative comfort compared to the other tenants of their apartment building. Frank spends his time bullying his mother, spying on the customers and the young girls, having sex with whichever girl happens to be working there that month, and going out to drink with his comrades, detestable characters much like him. We perceive that he has always yearned for a father figure while at the same time desiring to be fully accepted and recognized as a man. When he commits a crime as a rite of passage into manhood, things go spiraling out of his control. He then toys with fate.
“Now he could have said, “Fate!” Because he wanted fate to take an interest in him; he had done everything to force its hand and he continued to defy it from morning to night.”
Frank could stand with the likes of such anti-heroes as Roskolnikov of Crime and Punishment and Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr. Ripley. Both Roskolnikov and Frank commit a murderous act without any sense of initial regret. It’s been at least a decade since I’ve read Dostoyevsky, but I’d venture to say that Frank isn’t haunted by the same moral dilemmas or the burden of guilt. Well, he may in fact regret one action, but he won’t go on to be tormented to the end of days to the same depth as did Roskolnikov. This is where Frank would be better likened to Tom Ripley then perhaps. While Patricia Highsmith managed to make me actually root for Tom, I couldn’t muster up any misplaced loyalty towards Frank, however. My sympathy came much too late for him and by then the book was practically at an end.
Frank will soon learn that we all pay a price for our actions. When he commits the one act for which he seems to finally despise himself, his remorse comes too late. The last third of the book was the best in my opinion. A clearer understanding of Frank’s mind as well as the psychological tension turned this around for me quite a lot. Still, I couldn’t help comparing this to those other two books I’ve mentioned. As a result, this just felt like a lesser novel. My expectation to align myself on Frank’s dark side just didn’t happen here. Not Simenon’s fault. I blame it on Dostoyevsky and Highsmith!
“Frank has done what he wanted to do. He has turned the corner. He has looked on the other side. He didn’t see what he had been expecting to see.”
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September 4, 2021
AL DI LÀ DELLA LINEA
Daniel Gelin è un Frank con 12/15 anni in più del protagonista del romanzo.
Al di là della linea è dove è passato Frank (Friedmaier): ha oltrepassato quella linea tracciata dalla morale, dall’etica, dalla convenzione sociale, dalla legge. È entrato in quel mondo dove le regole si fanno da soli, si rispettano se si vuole e se fa comodo. Il mondo del più forte: di quello che vuole esserlo, o più semplicemente, crede e spera di esserlo.
Se non che…
Se non che, Frank, che non ha mai conosciuto suo padre, che conosce sua madre, giovane donna (38enne) ex prostituta che ora dirige un bordello, Frank ha demoni dentro. Dai quali non riesce a liberarsi. Manca la figura paterna. Manca l’autorità: ma anche la guida. Manca quel tipo di amore.
Simenon ci porta nella mente di un criminale. Un viaggio che disturba: perché disturbante è la personalità di Frank.
Ci porta in una parte d’Europa alla quale non dà mai nome: sappiamo che è al nord. Ma al nord di cosa? Alsazia? Olanda?
Sappiamo che Frank ha diciannove anni, che dovrebbero essere pochi, ma in quell’epoca, l’ultima guerra mondiale, durante l’occupazione di una potenza straniera - e neanche a questa viene dato nome, ma è automatico identificarla con quella nazista - con il Male che comanda, che regna, il Male Frank lo porta anche in casa. Lo porta dentro di sé.
Sono tempi duri, e il diciannovenne Frank si è temprato per affrontarli. E per ispessire la sua scorza e la sua corazza decide di compiere il crimine gratuito, inutile, la prova che sta tra il saggio di coraggio e quello di libertà selvaggia: uccidere qualcuno senza motivo. Togliere la vita per il gusto di farlo. Per assaggiare, sperimentare, temprare. Per crescere.
Simenon ci porta nella sua testa, nel suo cuore. Dove non esiste solo male: dove incontriamo una qualche forma d’innocenza, quella che probabilmente prepara il finale. Una terra che prima di lui, Dostoevskij ha esplorato senza freno. Delitto e castigo.
La neve è bianca ma sporca, perché il male è in città. È in casa. Regna sovrano. E per le strade, nelle case, dalle finestre si vive e perpetua tradimento, delazione, rancore, doppio gioco, collaborazionismo, o resistenza.
Si affaccia l’amore. Ma Frank, che non conosce l’amore di un padre, e neppure quello per un padre, si fa beffe dell’amore della ragazza che stravede per lui.
Ha scelto di camminare al di là della linea.
Per cercare se stesso sceglie di camminare in solitudine.
Forse era vero: non era triste, ma non provava nemmeno il bisogno di ridere e scherzare. Restava sempre impassibile, ed era questa la cosa che sconcertava.
Il film omonimo diretto da Luis Saslavsky nel 1954.
Daniel Gelin è un Frank con 12/15 anni in più del protagonista del romanzo.
Al di là della linea è dove è passato Frank (Friedmaier): ha oltrepassato quella linea tracciata dalla morale, dall’etica, dalla convenzione sociale, dalla legge. È entrato in quel mondo dove le regole si fanno da soli, si rispettano se si vuole e se fa comodo. Il mondo del più forte: di quello che vuole esserlo, o più semplicemente, crede e spera di esserlo.
Se non che…
Se non che, Frank, che non ha mai conosciuto suo padre, che conosce sua madre, giovane donna (38enne) ex prostituta che ora dirige un bordello, Frank ha demoni dentro. Dai quali non riesce a liberarsi. Manca la figura paterna. Manca l’autorità: ma anche la guida. Manca quel tipo di amore.
Simenon ci porta nella mente di un criminale. Un viaggio che disturba: perché disturbante è la personalità di Frank.
Ci porta in una parte d’Europa alla quale non dà mai nome: sappiamo che è al nord. Ma al nord di cosa? Alsazia? Olanda?
Sappiamo che Frank ha diciannove anni, che dovrebbero essere pochi, ma in quell’epoca, l’ultima guerra mondiale, durante l’occupazione di una potenza straniera - e neanche a questa viene dato nome, ma è automatico identificarla con quella nazista - con il Male che comanda, che regna, il Male Frank lo porta anche in casa. Lo porta dentro di sé.
Sono tempi duri, e il diciannovenne Frank si è temprato per affrontarli. E per ispessire la sua scorza e la sua corazza decide di compiere il crimine gratuito, inutile, la prova che sta tra il saggio di coraggio e quello di libertà selvaggia: uccidere qualcuno senza motivo. Togliere la vita per il gusto di farlo. Per assaggiare, sperimentare, temprare. Per crescere.
Simenon ci porta nella sua testa, nel suo cuore. Dove non esiste solo male: dove incontriamo una qualche forma d’innocenza, quella che probabilmente prepara il finale. Una terra che prima di lui, Dostoevskij ha esplorato senza freno. Delitto e castigo.
La neve è bianca ma sporca, perché il male è in città. È in casa. Regna sovrano. E per le strade, nelle case, dalle finestre si vive e perpetua tradimento, delazione, rancore, doppio gioco, collaborazionismo, o resistenza.
Si affaccia l’amore. Ma Frank, che non conosce l’amore di un padre, e neppure quello per un padre, si fa beffe dell’amore della ragazza che stravede per lui.
Ha scelto di camminare al di là della linea.
Per cercare se stesso sceglie di camminare in solitudine.
Forse era vero: non era triste, ma non provava nemmeno il bisogno di ridere e scherzare. Restava sempre impassibile, ed era questa la cosa che sconcertava.
Il film omonimo diretto da Luis Saslavsky nel 1954.
May 12, 2023
This is my first of Simeon’s ‘roman durs.’ The prolific writer wrote 117 of them. The phrase means ‘hard’ novels or ‘harrowing’ novels and generally the phrase specifically applies to Simenon, otherwise known for his 75 Inspector Maigret novels. This novel, Dirty Snow, is a tale of pointless evil.
When we read praise of Simenon’s writing, it is not in reference to his tame Maigret novels. For example John Banville wrote of his Simenon’s “extraordinary masterpieces of the twentieth century.” William Faulkner said “I love reading Simenon. He makes me think of Chekhov.” And [maybe a bit much] a reviewer in The Independent wrote “Simenon ought to be spoken of in the same breath as Camus, Beckett and Kafka.”
The story is set during the German occupation of Paris and it's focused on a young man, probably 20-ish, who grows up in a brothel. He never knew his father and his mother is the Madame. As the Madame’s son he has his choice of any woman but that’s an occasional thing and he seems generally uninterested in them. He has plenty of money that he gets from his mother because she’s afraid of him. The women in the brothel wait on him as maids, cooking for him and bringing him coffee. Mostly he hangs out in bars, occasionally picking up a woman to join his mother’s crew.
We’re immediately plunged into a dark world where men brag about how many people they've killed and why, One of them tells how he strangled a prostitute because she was pregnant.
The young man decides it's time he killed somebody. One of the tenants in the building, an older widowed man with a teen-aged daughter sees what he did. The young man becomes obsessed with interacting with this older man – his missing father figure?
The main character and a bar acquaintance plot a way to make money.
He does another truly bizarre, hideous thing to get the attention of the older tenant.
Now we get into what I'll call Raskolnikov mode. He never brags about the crimes he committed but flashes the gun around and shows off his wad of money despite warnings from his friends in the bars about how unwise that is. It's almost like he wants to be caught and punished for his evil deeds.
Sure enough, he is arrested. He (and the reader) never know which of his crimes he was arrested for – maybe all of them. The last third of the book is the cat-and-mouse game he plays with his interrogators, offering bits of information piece by piece. He wants to be beaten and executed.
An Afterword to the novel tells us that its theme is pointlessness. He had a pointless life. He did pointless things. Perhaps the only non-pointless thing happens at the end. He has no idea why he is on this earth and does not even seem to know what he wants.
Indeed dark.
Incredibly, Georges Simenon (1903-1989), a Belgian novelist writing in French, wrote more than 500 novels.
Top photo a movie still from a version of The Third Man from refractionsfilm.files.wordpress.com
The author from newyorker.com
When we read praise of Simenon’s writing, it is not in reference to his tame Maigret novels. For example John Banville wrote of his Simenon’s “extraordinary masterpieces of the twentieth century.” William Faulkner said “I love reading Simenon. He makes me think of Chekhov.” And [maybe a bit much] a reviewer in The Independent wrote “Simenon ought to be spoken of in the same breath as Camus, Beckett and Kafka.”
The story is set during the German occupation of Paris and it's focused on a young man, probably 20-ish, who grows up in a brothel. He never knew his father and his mother is the Madame. As the Madame’s son he has his choice of any woman but that’s an occasional thing and he seems generally uninterested in them. He has plenty of money that he gets from his mother because she’s afraid of him. The women in the brothel wait on him as maids, cooking for him and bringing him coffee. Mostly he hangs out in bars, occasionally picking up a woman to join his mother’s crew.
We’re immediately plunged into a dark world where men brag about how many people they've killed and why, One of them tells how he strangled a prostitute because she was pregnant.
The young man decides it's time he killed somebody. One of the tenants in the building, an older widowed man with a teen-aged daughter sees what he did. The young man becomes obsessed with interacting with this older man – his missing father figure?
The main character and a bar acquaintance plot a way to make money.
He does another truly bizarre, hideous thing to get the attention of the older tenant.
Now we get into what I'll call Raskolnikov mode. He never brags about the crimes he committed but flashes the gun around and shows off his wad of money despite warnings from his friends in the bars about how unwise that is. It's almost like he wants to be caught and punished for his evil deeds.
Sure enough, he is arrested. He (and the reader) never know which of his crimes he was arrested for – maybe all of them. The last third of the book is the cat-and-mouse game he plays with his interrogators, offering bits of information piece by piece. He wants to be beaten and executed.
An Afterword to the novel tells us that its theme is pointlessness. He had a pointless life. He did pointless things. Perhaps the only non-pointless thing happens at the end. He has no idea why he is on this earth and does not even seem to know what he wants.
Indeed dark.
Incredibly, Georges Simenon (1903-1989), a Belgian novelist writing in French, wrote more than 500 novels.
Top photo a movie still from a version of The Third Man from refractionsfilm.files.wordpress.com
The author from newyorker.com
October 25, 2019
Simenon es un hábil creador de ambientes inquietantes y de personajes tortuosos que llegan realmente a incomodarnos mientras, como en este caso, escuchamos a un narrador distante con los hechos, actitudes y sentimientos que relata, y al que, en fuerte contraste con esa posición neutral, sorprendemos (y nos sorprendemos) dudando o cuestionando las reacciones del personaje central.
En este libro entramos en una ciudad ocupada, en la que, como en toda ciudad ocupada, se entremezclan aquellos que deciden no resignarse y luchar con los que únicamente se dedican a sobrevivir y aquellos que decidieron colaborar para no empeorar sus vidas. Uno de estos últimos, el hijo despótico de una madame(*), es un ser frío y sucio como esa nieve que bordea las calles, un arquetipo de la necesidad de límites que el ser humano precisa para no resbalar por cualquiera de los muchos abismos con los que la naturaleza nos ha dotado en potencia.
En este sentido, me ha recordado muchísimo a aquel gran personaje dostoievskano de Memorias del subusuelo. Alguien imposibilitado para vivir, que no encuentra sentido en nada, que parece buscar su propia desdicha a través de la desdicha de los demás a los que desprecia pero que en el fondo ansía amar y de los que en el fondo desea ser amado… aunque el precio a pagar por descubrir ese fondo sea tan alto como en este caso.
Pero también hay grandes diferencias en el planteamiento de ambas obras. Si al personaje del subsuelo le desbordaba la pasión, la rabia, al protagonista de Simenon le caracteriza una inhumana frialdad; si el primero se hundía en profundas y oscuras reflexiones, el segundo es un ser que actúa por impulsos, sin saber por qué ni para qué ni preocuparle las consecuencias, incluso las que el hecho pueda tener para sí mismo;
______________________________
(*) He leído algunos datos biográficos del autor y parece que, además de un putero superdotado, fue antisemita y colaboracionista con el régimen nazi. La novela está escrita desde su destierro en el país que quiso protegerle una vez acabada la guerra, los USA, y las malas lenguas comentan que la novela está basada en la vida de su hermano (parece ser que era el preferido de su madre, con la que George no se llevaba especialmente bien y a la que aquí dio el papel de madame) que, por cierto, acabó su vida en España protegido por el régimen franquista.
En este libro entramos en una ciudad ocupada, en la que, como en toda ciudad ocupada, se entremezclan aquellos que deciden no resignarse y luchar con los que únicamente se dedican a sobrevivir y aquellos que decidieron colaborar para no empeorar sus vidas. Uno de estos últimos, el hijo despótico de una madame(*), es un ser frío y sucio como esa nieve que bordea las calles, un arquetipo de la necesidad de límites que el ser humano precisa para no resbalar por cualquiera de los muchos abismos con los que la naturaleza nos ha dotado en potencia.
En este sentido, me ha recordado muchísimo a aquel gran personaje dostoievskano de Memorias del subusuelo. Alguien imposibilitado para vivir, que no encuentra sentido en nada, que parece buscar su propia desdicha a través de la desdicha de los demás a los que desprecia pero que en el fondo ansía amar y de los que en el fondo desea ser amado… aunque el precio a pagar por descubrir ese fondo sea tan alto como en este caso.
“… pensar por fin (…) en una ventana, en cuatro paredes, en una habitación con una cama, un hornillo –no se atreve a añadir la cuna-, en un hombre que se marcha por las mañanas sabiendo que volverá, en una mujer que se queda y que sabe que no está sola, que jamás estará sola, en el sol que sale y que se pone siempre por los mismos sitios, en una tartera de hojalata que uno lleva bajo el brazo como un tesoro, en unas botas de fieltro gris, en un geranio que florece, en cosas tan sencillas que nadie las conoce, o que la gente desprecia, de las que llega incluso a quejarse cuando las posee.”Otros paralelismos con la novela de Dostoievski, aparte de esa nieve que es el paisaje de ambas obras, es la renuncia al amor, no exenta de cierta compasión como (así lo he entendido yo) forma de autocastigarse o redimirse (la Liza rusa toma aquí el nombre de Sissy) o ese desvarío por traspasar los límites.
Pero también hay grandes diferencias en el planteamiento de ambas obras. Si al personaje del subsuelo le desbordaba la pasión, la rabia, al protagonista de Simenon le caracteriza una inhumana frialdad; si el primero se hundía en profundas y oscuras reflexiones, el segundo es un ser que actúa por impulsos, sin saber por qué ni para qué ni preocuparle las consecuencias, incluso las que el hecho pueda tener para sí mismo;
“Son cosas que no se explican, que es inútil tratar de hacerle comprender a alguien; es absolutamente necesario que ocurra; después, estará tranquilo.”si el dostoievskiano elige la humillación y el placer en esa humillación como única forma de traspasar los límites que desprecia, reflejo del rechazo que le producen los demás y hasta (o sobretodo) él mismo, el simenoniano, en igual circunstancias, toma el camino del mal por el mal, sin justificaciones ni excusas.
______________________________
(*) He leído algunos datos biográficos del autor y parece que, además de un putero superdotado, fue antisemita y colaboracionista con el régimen nazi. La novela está escrita desde su destierro en el país que quiso protegerle una vez acabada la guerra, los USA, y las malas lenguas comentan que la novela está basada en la vida de su hermano (parece ser que era el preferido de su madre, con la que George no se llevaba especialmente bien y a la que aquí dio el papel de madame) que, por cierto, acabó su vida en España protegido por el régimen franquista.
June 23, 2020
This was my first Simenon book, though certainly it won't be the last. Dirty Snow is a stark noir novel set during the German occupation of France in WW II, though the exact location and time period is never mentioned. The anti-hero, Frank, is a budding hoodlum who lives in his mother’s brothel. He spends his evenings in sleazy bars and associates with other small-time hoods, though he doesn't really have any close friends. He also samples his mother's whores when he takes a notion, though he doesn't seem to get much pleasure from sex or anything else.
During the course of this novel, Frank commits three heinous acts, two of them for no apparent reason and another for financial gain. What sets Frank apart from the average noir reprobate is that he seems to have almost no reasons or psychological motivations for most of his crimes. He doesn't seem to care about anything! Reading this book, I thought a lot about the Bruce Springsteen song, "Nebraska" which is based on the real-life murder spree of a Lincoln, Nebraska youth named Charlie Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. In an eight-day stretch, they killed 11 people. The final lines of the song are a response to the question of why he decided to go on the killing spree, and the answer is the chilling line, "I guess there's just a meanness, in this world."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebrask...
Springsteen took a little license with his tune, but one can imagine these lines being said by Frank, if he bothered to give any reason at all for his actions. His fatherless upbringing and prostitute/madam mother don't seem to have left any scars on his psyche. The occupation of his land by an invading foreign army hasn’t, either. Simenon does a great job of making the reader realize that people like Frank actually exist in this world.
There is also a sense that Frank is aware that his misdeeds will end in his undoing, though this is implied only through the term "destiny." He lives with no anxiety about what will happen to him and, indeed, almost seems to hasten his "destiny" by flaunting damning evidence of his crimes. It is as if he was aware his destiny was ineluctable and would have had the same outcome regardless of any attempt to alter his fate.
There's lots more dynamics to the story, which I've left out to avoid any spoilers--but suffice to say that if you're a reader who requires reasons for senseless, inexplicable violence and infliction of horrifying cruelty, this may not be the book for you. William Vollman writes the afterward for this book. Vollman is a writer who's put himself in many horrifying situations and written a seven-volume (Rising Up and Rising Down) study of human violence and atrocities. Vollman tries to offer some reasons for Frank's actions, but I found them unconvincing and thought he was trying too hard to make sense of Frank's behavior. I think Simenon's point, to the extent he had one in this novel, was that there are some humans whose motivations cannot be sussed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iir_x... (Nebraska song)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles...
During the course of this novel, Frank commits three heinous acts, two of them for no apparent reason and another for financial gain. What sets Frank apart from the average noir reprobate is that he seems to have almost no reasons or psychological motivations for most of his crimes. He doesn't seem to care about anything! Reading this book, I thought a lot about the Bruce Springsteen song, "Nebraska" which is based on the real-life murder spree of a Lincoln, Nebraska youth named Charlie Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. In an eight-day stretch, they killed 11 people. The final lines of the song are a response to the question of why he decided to go on the killing spree, and the answer is the chilling line, "I guess there's just a meanness, in this world."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebrask...
Springsteen took a little license with his tune, but one can imagine these lines being said by Frank, if he bothered to give any reason at all for his actions. His fatherless upbringing and prostitute/madam mother don't seem to have left any scars on his psyche. The occupation of his land by an invading foreign army hasn’t, either. Simenon does a great job of making the reader realize that people like Frank actually exist in this world.
There is also a sense that Frank is aware that his misdeeds will end in his undoing, though this is implied only through the term "destiny." He lives with no anxiety about what will happen to him and, indeed, almost seems to hasten his "destiny" by flaunting damning evidence of his crimes. It is as if he was aware his destiny was ineluctable and would have had the same outcome regardless of any attempt to alter his fate.
There's lots more dynamics to the story, which I've left out to avoid any spoilers--but suffice to say that if you're a reader who requires reasons for senseless, inexplicable violence and infliction of horrifying cruelty, this may not be the book for you. William Vollman writes the afterward for this book. Vollman is a writer who's put himself in many horrifying situations and written a seven-volume (Rising Up and Rising Down) study of human violence and atrocities. Vollman tries to offer some reasons for Frank's actions, but I found them unconvincing and thought he was trying too hard to make sense of Frank's behavior. I think Simenon's point, to the extent he had one in this novel, was that there are some humans whose motivations cannot be sussed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iir_x... (Nebraska song)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles...
April 28, 2019
Corporate Occupation
From time to time Georges Simenon has been either accused of collaboration or praised for his resistance during the German occupation of France in WWII. Dirty Snow suggests that a substantial middle ground, which might be called ‘exploitative participation’, exists and could just be closer to the truth. This region is inhabited by many, particularly those of the permanent underclass who perceive occupation as another not terribly significant fact of life to be dealt with by the usual means: crime.
Or more precisely, purposeless criminality. For the protagonist, Frank, military occupation simply means increased opportunity. Murder, in particular, is less problematic than during peacetime and one simply yearns to test one’s mettle in such a permissive atmosphere. In fact, all relationships are worth less to Frank than they might have been otherwise - with the naive girl who lives across the landing, with the newly recruited prostitutes in his mother’s brothel, with his felonious pals. All are expendable.
But aside from the momentary thrill of conquest, none of Frank’s actions are meant to advance any objective. He already lives well with no financial concerns and no real worry about punishment. He’s on the way up in the underworld society, which itself is entirely nihilistic: "Everyone has something on everyone else, so that everyone, on closer view, has something to feel guilty about. In other words, the only reason you don’t betray other people is for fear of being betrayed by them.” The skill, therefore, is to be the first to betray.
On second or third thought, could it be that most of us occupy this middle ground of exploitative participation in the corporate society which itself acts as an occupational force in our midst? Getting on for the sake of getting on. Acting for the thrill of reputational advance. Murder and other illegalities may be off limits, but betrayal in the corporate world comes just as easily as it does for Frank in occupied territory. Frank may merely be the apotheosis of the good corporate citizen.
From time to time Georges Simenon has been either accused of collaboration or praised for his resistance during the German occupation of France in WWII. Dirty Snow suggests that a substantial middle ground, which might be called ‘exploitative participation’, exists and could just be closer to the truth. This region is inhabited by many, particularly those of the permanent underclass who perceive occupation as another not terribly significant fact of life to be dealt with by the usual means: crime.
Or more precisely, purposeless criminality. For the protagonist, Frank, military occupation simply means increased opportunity. Murder, in particular, is less problematic than during peacetime and one simply yearns to test one’s mettle in such a permissive atmosphere. In fact, all relationships are worth less to Frank than they might have been otherwise - with the naive girl who lives across the landing, with the newly recruited prostitutes in his mother’s brothel, with his felonious pals. All are expendable.
But aside from the momentary thrill of conquest, none of Frank’s actions are meant to advance any objective. He already lives well with no financial concerns and no real worry about punishment. He’s on the way up in the underworld society, which itself is entirely nihilistic: "Everyone has something on everyone else, so that everyone, on closer view, has something to feel guilty about. In other words, the only reason you don’t betray other people is for fear of being betrayed by them.” The skill, therefore, is to be the first to betray.
On second or third thought, could it be that most of us occupy this middle ground of exploitative participation in the corporate society which itself acts as an occupational force in our midst? Getting on for the sake of getting on. Acting for the thrill of reputational advance. Murder and other illegalities may be off limits, but betrayal in the corporate world comes just as easily as it does for Frank in occupied territory. Frank may merely be the apotheosis of the good corporate citizen.
February 10, 2020
ENGLISH (Dirty Snow) / ITALIANO
Noir colors for this journey into the abyss of the 19-year-old Frank Friedmaier. Do you remember or have you known Rodiòn Romànovič Raskòl'nikov, the troubled 23-year-old protagonist of Crime and Punishment? Well, it seems that the Frank Friedmaier's dark path is son of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, when the aim is to describe the pain appropriate to the man's salvation. However, the two characters (Raskòl'nikov and Friedmaier) show substantial differences. Remorse and regret characterize Raskòl'nikov, not caring and peaceful acceptance of his own fate belong instead to Friedmaier. That one of Frank looks like a challenge against the world, spending his days planning and perpetrating heinous acts for the fun of it, with insolence.
But redemption, sooner or later, comes to us all.
Vote: 8
«Senza un avvenimento fortuito, il gesto di Frank Friedmaier avrebbe avuto quella notte un’importanza relativa»Toni noir per questo viaggio nell'abisso del diciannovenne Frank Friedmaier. Ricordate o avete conosciuto Rodiòn Romànovič Raskòl'nikov, il tormentato ventitreenne protagonista di Delitto e Castigo? Ebbene, si direbbe che il percorso oscuro di Frank Friedmaier sia figlio di quel gigantesco Fyodor Dostoyevsky, insuperabile quando si tratta di descrivere la sofferenza funzionale alla salvezza dell'individuo. I due personaggi tuttavia presentano differenze sostanziali. Rimorso e pentimento caratterizzano Raskòl'nikov, menefreghismo e tranquilla accettazione del proprio destino appartengono invece a Friedmaier. E' quasi una sfida al mondo, quella di Frank, che passa la giornate a progettare e compiere atti nefandi per il gusto di farlo, con insolenza.
Ma la redenzione prima o poi arriva per tutti.
Voto: 8
September 7, 2017
Dirty Snow: a withering parade of apathy, it languishes and eventually disintegrates in a desolate gray landscape of inscrutable uncertainty. (A perfect summer beach read.) Eighteen-year-old Frank, the fiercely vacant antihero, is a callous, arrogant thug. He commits increasingly depraved acts, determined to prove that he’s an emotionless killer who doesn’t give a shit about anything. This desire, of course, reveals that he isn’t quite as indifferent as he likes to think he is. It takes him a while to figure this out. By the time he does, it’s too late. Or wasn’t it always?
All in all, a seductively bleak, tightly written descent into existential malaise, emptiness and despair.
All in all, a seductively bleak, tightly written descent into existential malaise, emptiness and despair.
“Frank had done what he wanted to do. He had rounded the cape. He had looked at the other side. He hadn’t seen what he expected to see. Who cared?”
March 20, 2022
In his afterword to this novel, William T. Vollmann opines "As technology and corporatism impel us more and more to treat one another like things, loyalty and decency approach irrelevance, except between intimates, and sometimes even then." Dirty Snow is certainly a book that compels a reader to feel much the same as WTV does about what happens to the human soul in the trash compactor crush of Money and Civilization - but there are many books that tell this story. So why read this one?
Simenon's particular genius is giving us a protagonist loathsome yet relatable and portrayed with a subtlety that belies his horrific actions. Frank is like the rest of us - his need to count, to be known / recognized isn't anything new. Simenon puts us in the mind of a creature that - by the end of the story - we find real discomfort in just how human a monster can be. The snow falls where it wants, when it wants, whether mankind wishes it or no. In the end all we can do is make it filthy.
Simenon's particular genius is giving us a protagonist loathsome yet relatable and portrayed with a subtlety that belies his horrific actions. Frank is like the rest of us - his need to count, to be known / recognized isn't anything new. Simenon puts us in the mind of a creature that - by the end of the story - we find real discomfort in just how human a monster can be. The snow falls where it wants, when it wants, whether mankind wishes it or no. In the end all we can do is make it filthy.
April 2, 2017
1 1/4 perhaps
M’sieur, could I have a word please?
Yes, what is it?
We notice that you recently finished reading Dirty Snow. Would you care to answer a few questions about it?
Yes, I would like that. I think it might be more useful to me than you can imagine.
Well, first we have seen that you initially gave it 4 stars, then changed it to 2. Why was that?
I think my initial rating was a result of not wanting to appear dim-witted. But after a considerable amount of thought, I realized that I couldn’t give it 4 stars, based on the way I rate books.
And what is that?
My ratings basically are indications of the experience I had reading a book, and what I thought I was able to take away from that experience. They do not attempt to pass any kind of judgment on the worth, quality, whatever, of the book (at least not usually). Based on this, I realized that the proper rating for the book was no more than 2.
So you didn’t enjoy reading this book?
Certainly not. That’s not to say that I found it totally uninteresting.
Why didn’t you enjoy it?
Well, what’s to enjoy? I suppose if one were a huge fan of noir, one could find the experience of reading this book very satisfying. But my guess is that this example of noir might be very extreme. Wouldn’t it be the case that in most noir novels there is at least one main character that we can relate to on some level? I didn’t find that here.
We’ll ask the questions, if you please. So you couldn’t relate to Frank in any way?
Look, I’m a person who likes to think that he has quite a capability of empathizing with people. But that is only possible when you can discern something about the person’s life, attitudes, beliefs, desires, that you either have direct experience with yourself, or can (you think) imagine what having such experience would be like. For me, I can’t find anything like that in Frank. Frankly (ho-ho) if I knew a person like Frank, I would stay far away from him; and if I couldn’t do that, I would probably try to figure out some way of eliminating him from my environment, like you eliminate poison ivy from your backyard.
You did admit that you found something interesting in the book, didn’t you?
Yes. The story line itself was certainly interesting enough to keep me reading, at least in the sense that I did continue to wonder what the outcome of this repellant chain of events would be. I also thought the tale went up a notch in the third part of the book, which recalled to me impressions I still had from reading Kafka’s Trial long ago.
It’s sometimes said that this novel is a magnificent tale about what it is like for a city to be occupied by a foreign army. Any thoughts on that?
There is something to that, much rings very true in that regard. But many different stories could have been told, that would not only include all those keen observations about foreign occupation, but would at the same time not be so unremittingly unpleasant to read.
So you really have very little in the way of positive comments?
SPOILER ALERT – this paragraph only!
So we can assume that you won’t be reading any further Simenon works?
Not true, actually. I suspect I will sample him at least once more. If that experience is another “2”, then I will give him up. Perhaps I’ll give The Man Who Watched Trains Go By a try.
Well, so your assessment of Simenon is not cast in concrete – or the concrete hasn’t yet dried, at any rate?
Correct. However, I can say this. Anyone who were to call Simenon a “genius”, or judge his works to surpass, for example, a writer like Dostoevsky, would in my opinion be off their rocker. Naturally, one person’s rocker can be another’s kindling, so again, we are talking subjectivity here.
And finally – would you recommend the book to any sort of reader?
I guess if someone were to read this interview, and be curious, or positively enthusiastic, about the book, I would say (as someone said to me) “Go for it!” I don’t think I know anyone like that, but I know damn well that such readers are there.
(By the way, that would be what I like to believe my reviews can help someone do, decide whether they might want to read the book.)
Merci, M’sieur
And thank you! I’m glad I got these things off my chest. Au revoir!
M’sieur, could I have a word please?
Yes, what is it?
We notice that you recently finished reading Dirty Snow. Would you care to answer a few questions about it?
Yes, I would like that. I think it might be more useful to me than you can imagine.
Well, first we have seen that you initially gave it 4 stars, then changed it to 2. Why was that?
I think my initial rating was a result of not wanting to appear dim-witted. But after a considerable amount of thought, I realized that I couldn’t give it 4 stars, based on the way I rate books.
And what is that?
My ratings basically are indications of the experience I had reading a book, and what I thought I was able to take away from that experience. They do not attempt to pass any kind of judgment on the worth, quality, whatever, of the book (at least not usually). Based on this, I realized that the proper rating for the book was no more than 2.
So you didn’t enjoy reading this book?
Certainly not. That’s not to say that I found it totally uninteresting.
Why didn’t you enjoy it?
Well, what’s to enjoy? I suppose if one were a huge fan of noir, one could find the experience of reading this book very satisfying. But my guess is that this example of noir might be very extreme. Wouldn’t it be the case that in most noir novels there is at least one main character that we can relate to on some level? I didn’t find that here.
We’ll ask the questions, if you please. So you couldn’t relate to Frank in any way?
Look, I’m a person who likes to think that he has quite a capability of empathizing with people. But that is only possible when you can discern something about the person’s life, attitudes, beliefs, desires, that you either have direct experience with yourself, or can (you think) imagine what having such experience would be like. For me, I can’t find anything like that in Frank. Frankly (ho-ho) if I knew a person like Frank, I would stay far away from him; and if I couldn’t do that, I would probably try to figure out some way of eliminating him from my environment, like you eliminate poison ivy from your backyard.
You did admit that you found something interesting in the book, didn’t you?
Yes. The story line itself was certainly interesting enough to keep me reading, at least in the sense that I did continue to wonder what the outcome of this repellant chain of events would be. I also thought the tale went up a notch in the third part of the book, which recalled to me impressions I still had from reading Kafka’s Trial long ago.
It’s sometimes said that this novel is a magnificent tale about what it is like for a city to be occupied by a foreign army. Any thoughts on that?
There is something to that, much rings very true in that regard. But many different stories could have been told, that would not only include all those keen observations about foreign occupation, but would at the same time not be so unremittingly unpleasant to read.
So you really have very little in the way of positive comments?
SPOILER ALERT – this paragraph only!
So we can assume that you won’t be reading any further Simenon works?
Not true, actually. I suspect I will sample him at least once more. If that experience is another “2”, then I will give him up. Perhaps I’ll give The Man Who Watched Trains Go By a try.
Well, so your assessment of Simenon is not cast in concrete – or the concrete hasn’t yet dried, at any rate?
Correct. However, I can say this. Anyone who were to call Simenon a “genius”, or judge his works to surpass, for example, a writer like Dostoevsky, would in my opinion be off their rocker. Naturally, one person’s rocker can be another’s kindling, so again, we are talking subjectivity here.
And finally – would you recommend the book to any sort of reader?
I guess if someone were to read this interview, and be curious, or positively enthusiastic, about the book, I would say (as someone said to me) “Go for it!” I don’t think I know anyone like that, but I know damn well that such readers are there.
(By the way, that would be what I like to believe my reviews can help someone do, decide whether they might want to read the book.)
Merci, M’sieur
And thank you! I’m glad I got these things off my chest. Au revoir!
September 7, 2011
Simenon's ecstatically bleak Dirty Snow teeters on the fulcrum between four and five starness and only just barely comes to rest on the four star side. A lot of hand wringing and soul searching went into this rating (or at least two minutes' worth), but in the end I concluded that the only quality Dirty Snow lacks is that ineffable something-or-other that makes a novel grab you by the balls and shout, 'I'm a five star book, damn it! Hearken to my greatness!' The first thing I want to say about Dirty Snow is actually something about two other books—namely Sartre's Nausea and Camus' The Stranger, both of which you can safely chuck on the book burning pyre because Dirty Snow is the definitive fictional rendering of existentialism. Unlike its more celebrated forebears, Simenon's work is actually alive—not just some nakedly abstract concept onto which character and plot are clumsily affixed. The protagonist Frank is a nineteen-year-old asshole in a presumably German-occupied country during World War II. (The location is appropriately indistinct. Like everything else, it's pointless.) Frank has no real friends and doesn't give a shit about anybody—not his fretful mother Lotte who runs a brothel out of their apartment, not Sissy the girl next door who's infatuated with him, and not Kromer his partner in crime. Not even himself. Entirely lacking in purpose, Frank thieves and murders without moral compunction; but his crimes are less profit-motivated or purely sadistic than they are strange, floundering assertions of self in an arbitrary and morally convoluted world. The last fifty to seventy-five pages of the book are a total downer, to the extent that the whole fucked-up punitive system of the occupation forces is basically a stand-in for life in general. We try to make sense of it all or to feel important or relevant in some small, stupid way, but hey... guess what? [Spoiler!] We're all a big ol' steamin' pile of nothin'. Good night. You've been a lovely audience!
April 8, 2018
Το συγκεκριμένο μυθιστόρημα είναι μακράν το πιο μαύρο και σκοτεινό μυθιστόρημα από όσα του Simenon έχω διαβάσει. Ανατόμος της ανθρώπινης ψυχής όπως είναι και δη των ανθρώπων του περιθωρίου, περιγράφοντας την πορεία του πρωταγωνιστή προς το μοιραίο ταυτόχρονα σκιαγραφεί το ζοφερό κλίμα που πλανάται πάνω Ευρώπη κατά την διάρκεια του Β' Παγκοσμίου πολέμου, περίοδος που η λέξη άνθρωπος σήμαινε ελάχιστα. Ο πρωταγωνιστής χωρίς συναισθήματα, χωρίς σκοπό, έρμαιο μονάχα των ενστίκτων του σαν μοναχικός λύκος , προβαίνει σε ακραίες πράξεις, διώχνει και τιμωρεί οποιωνδήποτε πάει του εκμαιεύσει κάποιο συναίσθημα, επιδιώκοντας να συμβεί αυτό το "κάτι" που θα νοηματοδοτήσει την ύπαρξη του. Ο simenon είναι απαισιόδοξος για το ανθρώπινο είδος αλλά ταυτόχρονα βαθιά ουμανιστής μέσω της προσπάθειας τους κατανόησης της ανθρώπινης κατάστασης σε ακραίες συνθήκες. Κατά την διάρκεια της φυλάκισης του ήρωα και ενώ υποβάλλεται σε συνεχείς ανακρίσεις και βασανιστήρια, ανακαλύπτει και παρατηρεί από το παράθυρο της φυλακής μια γυναίκα από την απέναντι πολυκατοικία που κάνει τις καθημερινές οικιακές δουλείες ρουτίνας, σε τρίτο πρόσωπο γράφει"Πρέπει να κρατήσει μέχρι το τέλος, με μάτια κλειστά, αυτιά που βουίζουν, να ακούσει το αίμα που κυλάει στις φλέβες, να νιώσει το σώμα του να ζει, να σκεφτεί επιτέλους κάτι άλλο, ένα παράθυρο με τέσσερις τοίχους, ένα δωμάτιο με ένα κρεβάτι, μια κουζίνα, έναν άντρα που φεύγει το πρωί ξέροντας ότι θα ξαναγυρίσει, μια γυναίκα που μένει πίσω και που ξέρει ότι δεν είναι μόνη, ότι δεν θα είναι ποτέ μόνη, τον ήλιο που ανατέλλει και δύει πάντα στα ίδια σημεία, ένα γεράνι που ανθίζει, απλά πράγματα που κανείς δεν τα ξέρει ή περιφρονεί, και καμιά φορά καταλήγει και παραπονιέται όταν τα έχει".
November 19, 2016
Second reading. Frank Friedmaier is hell-bent on destruction. Son and chief procurer of the local brothelkeeper, his mother, Frank is nineteen years old and a sociopath of the first order. This is collaborationist Vichy France. The men Frank admires the most are black marketeers, thieves, and murderers, men who brag about snuffing women during sex. Frank starts his descent by killing a fat policeman of the occupying army who shows his avid courtesies to the local whores. But murdering the Eunuch is just practice, a preliminary, and Frank’s way of arming himself with a fine automatic. Next he murders perhaps what we can call his true mother, his old wet nurse, who lives outside of town with her watchmaker brother. Frank’s gripe, though he could hardly say so, is his lack of a father. Frank wants to be a man. His crimes are failed attempts to initiate himself into manhood. Frank desperately needs guidance. That’s why he becomes obsessed with the closest person who might help him, his next door neighbor, Gerhard Holst. Frank is fascinated by Holst. When he finally condescends to approach Holst’s daughter, Sissy--Frank, sadly, is her first love--it is only to question her at length about her father. What did he do before the war? and so on. Later, when Sissy touches Frank’s heart, you know she is doomed. You wait anxiously for her despoliation which, when it comes, is horrendous, the act of a monster. This tale of brute thuggery and homocide in the wartime demimonde is a kind of a counter quest narrative. The anti-hero, Frank, must challenge himself to prove he is a man. What he does to everyone around him, but ultimately to himself, he thinks of as his initiation. His fatherlessness, his isolation among women, appalls him. The denouement, when the occupying authorities finally catch up with him, is surprising in its brevity and power. I found myself exclaiming aloud, something I never do. This is a wonderful novel. It's language is very flat, compressed, and sinuous. I’m glad I reread it. Second only to The Strangers in the House, it is my favorite Simenon. Effusively recommended.
PS Kudos to NYRB Classics for winnowing this one from Simenon's huge corpus.
First reading This is wonderful. It's the first Simenon I ever read and I found it vivid, engaging and moving. Dirty Snow is my second favorite Simenon, outranked only by The Strangers In The House.
PS Kudos to NYRB Classics for winnowing this one from Simenon's huge corpus.
First reading This is wonderful. It's the first Simenon I ever read and I found it vivid, engaging and moving. Dirty Snow is my second favorite Simenon, outranked only by The Strangers In The House.
September 17, 2018
The writer Georges Simenon was a Belgian (I thought he was French!) author who was incredibly prolific in creating noir crime novels and other books that delved into the darkness of the human psyche. He is considered by some as the father of the noir genre.
I nominated this book for a small reading group because of having read two outstanding novels by Graeme Macrae Burnet who said his writing was influenced by having read tons of Simenon books growing up. While just getting started with Dirty Snow, I noticed that the character names were more Germanic-sounding than French. The book is set during WWII while German forces occupied various parts of Europe. In one of Burnet's novels, he has the story take place in a French-Swiss border town, so I wondered if the French (or so I thought) Simenon also set his stories on the border. Nope! This one is set in Belgium, and now that a friend kindly let me know that this is Simenon's home country, things have clicked for me - a full three days after finishing!
In our group discussion, I pondered if writing all of those crime stories over the years is what led Simenon to go further into the human psyche with his other novels, essentially looking at the why behind certain crimes or certain mindsets. A hopeless or abusive upbringing can indeed mold monsters. I like looking behind the curtain, too, and for our group book discussion, I dug up some general info on author Simenon. It's true that he was living in Nazi occupied France during the war, but he was also later accused of having conspired with the Germans. He was eventually cleared of all the charges.
In this story, two men are accused of doing separate acts neither has done. Like Simenon was not guilty, neither were they. The book was published in 1948, and I cannot help but see some of the author's emotions and sense of irony in this particular story. Secondly, the reason that Simenon in real life was accused of collaborating with the enemy was that he wrote books or screenplays that were adopted into films by the Nazis. I do not know whether he wrote them specifically for the occupying forces or if they had been written before. In this fictional story, the main character and his mother are provided significant amounts of food by the Germans while their neighbors are nearly starving. Obviously, there is jealousy and disdain. The character in the story lives with his mother who operates a brothel that caters to German officers. So - did Simenon, Who wrote stories that were turned into films by the Nazis feel like he had prostitute himself? Did they give him extra food and supplies in exchange for his literary talents? No idea.
Whether that’s allmy invention or something legitimate, I don’t know. But it deepened the reading experience for me.
Dirty Snow was my first taste of Simenon’s works, and it reminded me of The Stranger by Camus. The anti-hero Frank was just too emotionless for me to care about until the closing chapter, despite the author's ability to convey in Frank a 19-year-old‘s desperate longing for a father.
I will try other works of Simenon but am left feeling dead eyed and empty for right now. Maybe that was the writer's intent.
I nominated this book for a small reading group because of having read two outstanding novels by Graeme Macrae Burnet who said his writing was influenced by having read tons of Simenon books growing up. While just getting started with Dirty Snow, I noticed that the character names were more Germanic-sounding than French. The book is set during WWII while German forces occupied various parts of Europe. In one of Burnet's novels, he has the story take place in a French-Swiss border town, so I wondered if the French (or so I thought) Simenon also set his stories on the border. Nope! This one is set in Belgium, and now that a friend kindly let me know that this is Simenon's home country, things have clicked for me - a full three days after finishing!
In our group discussion, I pondered if writing all of those crime stories over the years is what led Simenon to go further into the human psyche with his other novels, essentially looking at the why behind certain crimes or certain mindsets. A hopeless or abusive upbringing can indeed mold monsters. I like looking behind the curtain, too, and for our group book discussion, I dug up some general info on author Simenon. It's true that he was living in Nazi occupied France during the war, but he was also later accused of having conspired with the Germans. He was eventually cleared of all the charges.
In this story, two men are accused of doing separate acts neither has done. Like Simenon was not guilty, neither were they. The book was published in 1948, and I cannot help but see some of the author's emotions and sense of irony in this particular story. Secondly, the reason that Simenon in real life was accused of collaborating with the enemy was that he wrote books or screenplays that were adopted into films by the Nazis. I do not know whether he wrote them specifically for the occupying forces or if they had been written before. In this fictional story, the main character and his mother are provided significant amounts of food by the Germans while their neighbors are nearly starving. Obviously, there is jealousy and disdain. The character in the story lives with his mother who operates a brothel that caters to German officers. So - did Simenon, Who wrote stories that were turned into films by the Nazis feel like he had prostitute himself? Did they give him extra food and supplies in exchange for his literary talents? No idea.
Whether that’s allmy invention or something legitimate, I don’t know. But it deepened the reading experience for me.
Dirty Snow was my first taste of Simenon’s works, and it reminded me of The Stranger by Camus. The anti-hero Frank was just too emotionless for me to care about until the closing chapter, despite the author's ability to convey in Frank a 19-year-old‘s desperate longing for a father.
I will try other works of Simenon but am left feeling dead eyed and empty for right now. Maybe that was the writer's intent.
May 30, 2022
"A snot-nosed little bastard, that's what you are, a little louse who thinks he can get away with anything because his mother runs a whorehouse!"
Simenon presents a disturbing trip into the mind of a young psychopath - Frank Friedmaier. While others struggle to find food in German-occupied France, Frank and his mother are stuffing their faces. Mom Lotte peddles whores, then gets the girls to do all the housework. Her darling baby boy is a thief, a murderer, and an all-round scumbag, but after a particularly nasty incident involving a neighbor's young daughter, if seems only fitting that Frank may just get what's coming to him.
As William T Vollmann says in his afterward: Simenon has concentrated noir into a darkness as solid and heavy as the interior of a dark star.
His loathsome characters perpetrating vile deeds make for a read that's compelling as hell. I can't say I liked this one, but it was an impressive book that I'd eagerly read again.
Simenon presents a disturbing trip into the mind of a young psychopath - Frank Friedmaier. While others struggle to find food in German-occupied France, Frank and his mother are stuffing their faces. Mom Lotte peddles whores, then gets the girls to do all the housework. Her darling baby boy is a thief, a murderer, and an all-round scumbag, but after a particularly nasty incident involving a neighbor's young daughter, if seems only fitting that Frank may just get what's coming to him.
As William T Vollmann says in his afterward: Simenon has concentrated noir into a darkness as solid and heavy as the interior of a dark star.
His loathsome characters perpetrating vile deeds make for a read that's compelling as hell. I can't say I liked this one, but it was an impressive book that I'd eagerly read again.
January 24, 2020
This book consisted of 3 parts. I very much liked Part One of this book (told in 3 parts) – ‘Timo’s Customers’, in part because it moved so fast. I am not sure I ever saw any decent qualities in the protagonist, Frank, from the get-go, and it just got worse. He is 19 years old. Each crime he carried out got progressively worse in its nature. The crime against the 16-year old girl who loved him, Sissy (told in first chapter of Part Two, ‘Sissy’s Father’), was very disturbing. Only a psychopath…a sadist would do such a thing. I have a hard time understanding why he would pick that young woman/girl to do what he did – after all it appeared (and I may be dead wrong) that he did not have any animosity towards her poor father (in fact near the end he wished that Sissy’s father was his father). The rest of the book slowed down and was more a day-by-day playing out what happened afterwards.
It’s an interesting character study. I said Frank was a psychopath. It could not have helped that his mother semi-abandoned him when he was growing up as a child. And the mother ran a brothel in the same “house” (if you could call it that) where he lived later on. He had sex with the “help” there...he did not like the women he had sex with…
And although I said he was a psychopath, later on in the book were these thoughts from his head which would appear that he feels guilt which a psychopath would not feel:
(He has just been hit in the face by a big brass ruler by his interrogator…)
“And yet he had the impression that his left eye had come out of its socket. Like the cat in Mrs. Porse’s tree! The cat made him think of Sissy. When you have inflicted on someone what he inflicted in her, do you have the right to flinch because of any eye?”
“The reason he hasn’t been afraid of torture, the officer with the ruler or the old man and his acolytes is that nobody will ever be able to make him suffer the way he made himself suffer when he pushed Kromer into the bedroom.”
(This is when something terrible happened to a young woman who loved him, Sissy, and it was totally his doing. What is odd though and now makes me think once again he is less than human is that he thinks only about his OWN suffering and not at all about the suffering that Sissy went through. I don’t know. I guess that is the genius of Simenson’s writing…maybe one is left wondering.)
Near the end is a breath-taking climactic scene with Sissy and her father and Frank…again after reading those two pages I wonder about whether Frank is a psychopath after all.
This was a good read. I am anxious to post this review so I can then read other GR reviews and learn more about this book and its complexities!
Simenson wrote this book in 1948. I read the Penguin Classic edition (2016). The book that I read has this as the title: The Snow was Dirty.
To my GR friends who urged me to try Simenson, thank you!
It’s an interesting character study. I said Frank was a psychopath. It could not have helped that his mother semi-abandoned him when he was growing up as a child. And the mother ran a brothel in the same “house” (if you could call it that) where he lived later on. He had sex with the “help” there...he did not like the women he had sex with…
And although I said he was a psychopath, later on in the book were these thoughts from his head which would appear that he feels guilt which a psychopath would not feel:
(He has just been hit in the face by a big brass ruler by his interrogator…)
“And yet he had the impression that his left eye had come out of its socket. Like the cat in Mrs. Porse’s tree! The cat made him think of Sissy. When you have inflicted on someone what he inflicted in her, do you have the right to flinch because of any eye?”
“The reason he hasn’t been afraid of torture, the officer with the ruler or the old man and his acolytes is that nobody will ever be able to make him suffer the way he made himself suffer when he pushed Kromer into the bedroom.”
(This is when something terrible happened to a young woman who loved him, Sissy, and it was totally his doing. What is odd though and now makes me think once again he is less than human is that he thinks only about his OWN suffering and not at all about the suffering that Sissy went through. I don’t know. I guess that is the genius of Simenson’s writing…maybe one is left wondering.)
Near the end is a breath-taking climactic scene with Sissy and her father and Frank…again after reading those two pages I wonder about whether Frank is a psychopath after all.
This was a good read. I am anxious to post this review so I can then read other GR reviews and learn more about this book and its complexities!
Simenson wrote this book in 1948. I read the Penguin Classic edition (2016). The book that I read has this as the title: The Snow was Dirty.
To my GR friends who urged me to try Simenson, thank you!
May 28, 2018
A very brutal and ice cold book. The fate of the protagonist, 19-year old Frank who is a truly despicable young man, cannot end in any other way than what his devastating actions created. Another astonishing roman dur of Simenon!
June 21, 2022
Simenon has concentrated noir into a darkness as solid and heavy as the interior of a dwarf star.
William T. Vollmann, in the Afterword
I have yet to read any of the Commissaire Maigret novels, so I guess I am by this placing myself in the same category as the elitist critics who dismiss Simenon as a hack simply because he was really, really fast and extremely successful. But I have also read by now three of his ‘romans durs’, and each time I was moved to consider them the very pinnacle of style, clarity and insight. The author was actually right to be incensed by the attention received by Camus, knowing he had just written a novel at least as good as L’Etranger . Indeed, even dismissing the quotes from Faulkner comparing Simenon to Chekhov, and from other great literary authors, while reading La neige etait sale I found myself making comparisons with the spiritual turbulence of a Dostoyevsky, with the sense of alienation from Kafka and with the existential angst of Sartre.
Simenon does all this without any hint of imitation, almost effortlessly making the story his own, with his compact, stark but so evocative prose, with his razor sharp insights into the psyche of his characters. He also leaves the judgement, the interpretation fully open – giving us the facts of the case without trying to control where we take them when we leave the written page.
>>><<<>>><<<
Frank Friedmaier is a monster – there is no doubt about it: he comes clean from the opening pages, and is even boasting of the crimes he commits. The question asked by the author here is what exactly turned nineteen years old Frank into a grotesque, malevolent image of teenage rebellion? Does he even merit our effort to look inside the dark places of his soul? Our ultimate sympathy?
Unlike most people who drink, Frank doesn’t sweat, doesn’t talk loudly, doesn’t wave his arms about. On the contrary, his complexion grows paler, duller, his features sharper, his lips so thin that they are nothing but a pen line in his face. His eyes become quite small, with a cold, hard flame, as if he has started to hate the human race.
Maybe he has.
This portrait is uncomfortably familiar to the modern reader, especially in that country where mass shootings by teenage perpetrators happen with diabolical regularity. I could just see his baffled neighbours being interviewed and saying: He was the quiet type. Nobody knows what made him snap
The Frank Friedmaier of the novel lives in a nameless town during or immediately after the second world war, a city under occupation by an invading army that most readers will automatically assign to the German Reich, although the author was very careful to avoid specifics.
Unlike most of the population who struggles with ration cards, extreme poverty and abuse from patrols, Frank lives the easy life thanks to the popularity of his mother’s bordello, frequented by officers of the occupying army, and thanks to his contacts in the black market underworld, where he would like to be recognized as a man, and not as a snotty youngster.
Frank may be the quiet type, but he listens avidly to the tall tales of his friend Kromer, describing how he killed a woman simply because she was falling in love with him and wanted his child.
“I found it easier to strangle the mother. That was the first time. And you know something? It’s very easy. No big deal.”
Inside Timo’s elitist restaurant, Kromer and his gang are flashing money, expensive clothes and cocksure attitudes not available to the regular crowds outside. Frank craves the respect and the recognition of these brutes, even as he deeply despises them and considers himself to be above such petty concerns.
Nobody has urged him to do it. Nobody has laughed at him. Only idiots let themselves be influenced by their friends!
For weeks, months even, he has been saying to himself, feeling a kind of inferiority inside, ‘I have to try.’
Even more relevant to the modern reader is Frank’s fascination with guns – a symbol of manhood, of maturity in this twisted world – his need for some action to validate his insider credentials.
The belt was on the table, with the smooth, heavy revolver in its holster. The things you can do with a revolver! The kind of man you automatically become!
All of this exposition is a couple of pages at the start of the novel, before Frank kills for the first time, choosing at random the repulsive sergeant who gropes women in Timo’s and casually leaves his gun on the table. Almost as quickly, the sense of satisfaction in Frank is sabotaged by the grubby, sordid practical details of his crime, and by his need to be seen doing it: in particular to be seen by his next door neighbour Holst. Holst, a former professor pushed out of his job by the occupiers, works late as a tram conductor and has a beautiful daughter named Sissy that has caught the eyes of our teenage protagonist. As Holst passes by the dark alley where Frank waits he is forced to become a witness to the crime, making us consider if the time and place were deliberately chosen for this.
The dark alley is also the moment we are introduced to the central theme of the novel, as the industrial city is struggling with the last months of winter and as the white purity of the snow is marred by smog, dirt ... and blood. The relationship between the outside world and the inner landscape of Frank’s soul, between white aspirations and pure ‘noir’ Fate is made abundantly clear.
And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage. The white powder that occasionally peels off from the crust of the sky in little clumps, like plaster from a ceiling, is unable to cover the filth.
From this inauspicious beginning, Frank will only manage to climb lower and lower on a hypothetical scale of humanity. He abuses and terrorizes the girls who sell their bodies in his mother’s apartment, he kills an elderly woman in order to steal a valuable collection of watches, he seduces and rapes underage Sissy only to become angry with her when her father Holst still refuses to acknowledge his existence.
He doesn’t feel any pity for her. He doesn’t feel pity for anyone, himself included. He doesn’t ask for pity, and he won’t accept any, which is what annoys him about Lotte, who keeps giving him looks that are both anxious and loving.
The same excellent commentator Vollmann nails the explanation in the afterword: Frank wants desperately to be seen, to differentiate himself from his mother Lotte and from the black market goons he runs with. He is angry at the sick world he has been forced to live in and at the same time confused about what his options are. Like any wounded animal, Frank lashes out indiscriminately at the world.
Frank doesn’t know what he’s about, and it is a measure of his sickness (and his world’s) that all he can think of to do in order to discover himself is to commit acts of violence and betrayal.
The sickness of the world becomes the center stage for the second part of the novel. In a sort of homage to the classic Crime and Punishment , this second part sees Frank Friedmaier arrested by the secret police [Gestapo?] and ‘punished’ through psychological and physical torture for a crime that his jailers refuse to specify. Kafka would be proud of this long section that takes place almost entirely inside Frank’s head.
It all starts to form a grey, inconsistent, monotonous fog. The hours pass, one by one. They’re certainly the longest he has ever experienced. So much so that he sometimes feels like crying out when he looks at the alarm-clock and sees the hand in the same place.
Of all those hours, though, nothing will remain, just a few scraps, a residue, like a heap of ashes in a fireplace.
At the start of his detention, Frank still feels untouchable, thanks to his mother’s connections and to his own green pass from the occupiers. In parallel with this disdain, Frank also secretly hopes he can be tested under fire and accepted as a man, but he is still unsure what form this revelation will take.
Fate was lying in wait for him somewhere. But where? Instead of waiting for it to manifest itself, Frank was courting it, searching everywhere for it. It was as if he was shouting, ‘I’m here! What are you waiting for?’
There he was, as erect as a young cockerel, standing in front of that extraordinary power, and he behaved like a little boy who wants to be slapped.
Very late into his solitary incarceration, Frank finally manages to look beyond his navel and acknowledge the existence and the relevance of other people, but it is probably already too late. It was probably too late even before Frank decided to kill an unknown man in a dark alley filled with dirty snow. This is a 'noir' novel, after all.
Nobody can see him. He reaches out an arm, as if there is someone next to him, as if it is still possible there might be someone next to him one day.
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A tour de force from Simenon, this was an uncomfortable novel on many levels, yet awe inspiring, thought provoking in its brutal exposition. I had a final couple of quotes about Fate and ‘being seen’ , but right now I feel the need for something less bleak for a sort of closure. I know only too well that the snow is dirty and that the world is sick, yet this is also the world of Kurt Vonnegut:
Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
William T. Vollmann, in the Afterword
I have yet to read any of the Commissaire Maigret novels, so I guess I am by this placing myself in the same category as the elitist critics who dismiss Simenon as a hack simply because he was really, really fast and extremely successful. But I have also read by now three of his ‘romans durs’, and each time I was moved to consider them the very pinnacle of style, clarity and insight. The author was actually right to be incensed by the attention received by Camus, knowing he had just written a novel at least as good as L’Etranger . Indeed, even dismissing the quotes from Faulkner comparing Simenon to Chekhov, and from other great literary authors, while reading La neige etait sale I found myself making comparisons with the spiritual turbulence of a Dostoyevsky, with the sense of alienation from Kafka and with the existential angst of Sartre.
Simenon does all this without any hint of imitation, almost effortlessly making the story his own, with his compact, stark but so evocative prose, with his razor sharp insights into the psyche of his characters. He also leaves the judgement, the interpretation fully open – giving us the facts of the case without trying to control where we take them when we leave the written page.
>>><<<>>><<<
Frank Friedmaier is a monster – there is no doubt about it: he comes clean from the opening pages, and is even boasting of the crimes he commits. The question asked by the author here is what exactly turned nineteen years old Frank into a grotesque, malevolent image of teenage rebellion? Does he even merit our effort to look inside the dark places of his soul? Our ultimate sympathy?
Unlike most people who drink, Frank doesn’t sweat, doesn’t talk loudly, doesn’t wave his arms about. On the contrary, his complexion grows paler, duller, his features sharper, his lips so thin that they are nothing but a pen line in his face. His eyes become quite small, with a cold, hard flame, as if he has started to hate the human race.
Maybe he has.
This portrait is uncomfortably familiar to the modern reader, especially in that country where mass shootings by teenage perpetrators happen with diabolical regularity. I could just see his baffled neighbours being interviewed and saying: He was the quiet type. Nobody knows what made him snap
The Frank Friedmaier of the novel lives in a nameless town during or immediately after the second world war, a city under occupation by an invading army that most readers will automatically assign to the German Reich, although the author was very careful to avoid specifics.
Unlike most of the population who struggles with ration cards, extreme poverty and abuse from patrols, Frank lives the easy life thanks to the popularity of his mother’s bordello, frequented by officers of the occupying army, and thanks to his contacts in the black market underworld, where he would like to be recognized as a man, and not as a snotty youngster.
Frank may be the quiet type, but he listens avidly to the tall tales of his friend Kromer, describing how he killed a woman simply because she was falling in love with him and wanted his child.
“I found it easier to strangle the mother. That was the first time. And you know something? It’s very easy. No big deal.”
Inside Timo’s elitist restaurant, Kromer and his gang are flashing money, expensive clothes and cocksure attitudes not available to the regular crowds outside. Frank craves the respect and the recognition of these brutes, even as he deeply despises them and considers himself to be above such petty concerns.
Nobody has urged him to do it. Nobody has laughed at him. Only idiots let themselves be influenced by their friends!
For weeks, months even, he has been saying to himself, feeling a kind of inferiority inside, ‘I have to try.’
Even more relevant to the modern reader is Frank’s fascination with guns – a symbol of manhood, of maturity in this twisted world – his need for some action to validate his insider credentials.
The belt was on the table, with the smooth, heavy revolver in its holster. The things you can do with a revolver! The kind of man you automatically become!
All of this exposition is a couple of pages at the start of the novel, before Frank kills for the first time, choosing at random the repulsive sergeant who gropes women in Timo’s and casually leaves his gun on the table. Almost as quickly, the sense of satisfaction in Frank is sabotaged by the grubby, sordid practical details of his crime, and by his need to be seen doing it: in particular to be seen by his next door neighbour Holst. Holst, a former professor pushed out of his job by the occupiers, works late as a tram conductor and has a beautiful daughter named Sissy that has caught the eyes of our teenage protagonist. As Holst passes by the dark alley where Frank waits he is forced to become a witness to the crime, making us consider if the time and place were deliberately chosen for this.
The dark alley is also the moment we are introduced to the central theme of the novel, as the industrial city is struggling with the last months of winter and as the white purity of the snow is marred by smog, dirt ... and blood. The relationship between the outside world and the inner landscape of Frank’s soul, between white aspirations and pure ‘noir’ Fate is made abundantly clear.
And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage. The white powder that occasionally peels off from the crust of the sky in little clumps, like plaster from a ceiling, is unable to cover the filth.
From this inauspicious beginning, Frank will only manage to climb lower and lower on a hypothetical scale of humanity. He abuses and terrorizes the girls who sell their bodies in his mother’s apartment, he kills an elderly woman in order to steal a valuable collection of watches, he seduces and rapes underage Sissy only to become angry with her when her father Holst still refuses to acknowledge his existence.
He doesn’t feel any pity for her. He doesn’t feel pity for anyone, himself included. He doesn’t ask for pity, and he won’t accept any, which is what annoys him about Lotte, who keeps giving him looks that are both anxious and loving.
The same excellent commentator Vollmann nails the explanation in the afterword: Frank wants desperately to be seen, to differentiate himself from his mother Lotte and from the black market goons he runs with. He is angry at the sick world he has been forced to live in and at the same time confused about what his options are. Like any wounded animal, Frank lashes out indiscriminately at the world.
Frank doesn’t know what he’s about, and it is a measure of his sickness (and his world’s) that all he can think of to do in order to discover himself is to commit acts of violence and betrayal.
The sickness of the world becomes the center stage for the second part of the novel. In a sort of homage to the classic Crime and Punishment , this second part sees Frank Friedmaier arrested by the secret police [Gestapo?] and ‘punished’ through psychological and physical torture for a crime that his jailers refuse to specify. Kafka would be proud of this long section that takes place almost entirely inside Frank’s head.
It all starts to form a grey, inconsistent, monotonous fog. The hours pass, one by one. They’re certainly the longest he has ever experienced. So much so that he sometimes feels like crying out when he looks at the alarm-clock and sees the hand in the same place.
Of all those hours, though, nothing will remain, just a few scraps, a residue, like a heap of ashes in a fireplace.
At the start of his detention, Frank still feels untouchable, thanks to his mother’s connections and to his own green pass from the occupiers. In parallel with this disdain, Frank also secretly hopes he can be tested under fire and accepted as a man, but he is still unsure what form this revelation will take.
Fate was lying in wait for him somewhere. But where? Instead of waiting for it to manifest itself, Frank was courting it, searching everywhere for it. It was as if he was shouting, ‘I’m here! What are you waiting for?’
There he was, as erect as a young cockerel, standing in front of that extraordinary power, and he behaved like a little boy who wants to be slapped.
Very late into his solitary incarceration, Frank finally manages to look beyond his navel and acknowledge the existence and the relevance of other people, but it is probably already too late. It was probably too late even before Frank decided to kill an unknown man in a dark alley filled with dirty snow. This is a 'noir' novel, after all.
Nobody can see him. He reaches out an arm, as if there is someone next to him, as if it is still possible there might be someone next to him one day.
>>><<<>>><<<
A tour de force from Simenon, this was an uncomfortable novel on many levels, yet awe inspiring, thought provoking in its brutal exposition. I had a final couple of quotes about Fate and ‘being seen’ , but right now I feel the need for something less bleak for a sort of closure. I know only too well that the snow is dirty and that the world is sick, yet this is also the world of Kurt Vonnegut:
Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.
October 9, 2018
I have read very little Simenon (although I have read the first Maigret). However, on the recommendation of fellow reader, and reviewer, Nigeyb, I decided to give this a try. “The Snow was Dirty,” was one of Simenon’s, so-called, ‘straight’ or ‘hard’ novels. Certainly, this is a dark read and not an easy one, in which the author does not hesitate to tell the story of a cast of characters without any obvious redeeming features.
The main character of this novel is a young man named Frank Friedmaier, whose mother runs a brothel. We know the novel is set during the occupation of a country, although the precise location, or era, is never mentioned. Living in his apartment building, Frank, his mother and the various girls, who come and go, are viewed with distaste by the other occupants. Not only for their means of living, pandering to the whims of the occupiers, but because they have ample means to heat their apartment, as well as plenty of food.
Frank is a young man who is eager to make a name for himself and, at the very beginning of the book, he kills a man outside a bar; an action viewed by one of the neighbours, Gerhardt Holst, whose daughter is in love with Frank.
This bleak account of Frank’s adventures are split into two parts. The first is his life in the apartment; during which he is involved in various crimes. However, even as things begin to spiral out of control, the reader is aware that things will quickly go wrong; and, indeed, they do. The second part of the novel sees Frank imprisoned, in an old school, with Kafkaesque interrogations.
Although this is not an easy read, it is an oddly moving one. Frank is a young man who is adrift. Needing to leave the apartment during work hours, he is easily attracted by the kind of people who accept him as part of their own, underworld. Fatherless, it is implied that Holst, his neighbour, is something of a father figure to Frank, while, even as he lies imprisoned, he imagines the young woman he can see from the window, in an apartment block, lives the life that he could have shared with Holst’s daughter – if only things had been different.
The main character of this novel is a young man named Frank Friedmaier, whose mother runs a brothel. We know the novel is set during the occupation of a country, although the precise location, or era, is never mentioned. Living in his apartment building, Frank, his mother and the various girls, who come and go, are viewed with distaste by the other occupants. Not only for their means of living, pandering to the whims of the occupiers, but because they have ample means to heat their apartment, as well as plenty of food.
Frank is a young man who is eager to make a name for himself and, at the very beginning of the book, he kills a man outside a bar; an action viewed by one of the neighbours, Gerhardt Holst, whose daughter is in love with Frank.
This bleak account of Frank’s adventures are split into two parts. The first is his life in the apartment; during which he is involved in various crimes. However, even as things begin to spiral out of control, the reader is aware that things will quickly go wrong; and, indeed, they do. The second part of the novel sees Frank imprisoned, in an old school, with Kafkaesque interrogations.
Although this is not an easy read, it is an oddly moving one. Frank is a young man who is adrift. Needing to leave the apartment during work hours, he is easily attracted by the kind of people who accept him as part of their own, underworld. Fatherless, it is implied that Holst, his neighbour, is something of a father figure to Frank, while, even as he lies imprisoned, he imagines the young woman he can see from the window, in an apartment block, lives the life that he could have shared with Holst’s daughter – if only things had been different.
December 18, 2017
Ignore the original review (below). It’s garbage. It’s clear now that I didn’t understand the book at all on the first read. It was my first Simenon (I think), and I read it too quickly, without any patience. The book is much richer and deeper than I had realized.
Original Review: This is quite brilliant... I found the ambiguity of the ending unsatisfying (or too extended), and so 4.5 stars. Still, Simenon is clearly a much more important writer than I had ever imagined him to be.
The interrogation sessions seem more Stalinist than Hitlerian, and I wonder if that was not intentional, Simenon havinhg been a well known antisemite and Collaborator, and so probably a strong anti-communist.
Finally, the treatment of sexuality is quite robust -- hardly surprising, again, given Simenon's own propensities.
Original Review: This is quite brilliant... I found the ambiguity of the ending unsatisfying (or too extended), and so 4.5 stars. Still, Simenon is clearly a much more important writer than I had ever imagined him to be.
The interrogation sessions seem more Stalinist than Hitlerian, and I wonder if that was not intentional, Simenon havinhg been a well known antisemite and Collaborator, and so probably a strong anti-communist.
Finally, the treatment of sexuality is quite robust -- hardly surprising, again, given Simenon's own propensities.
March 4, 2018
2018 Reading Challenge: recommended by book club member
Every character in this book is absolutely repellent to me similar to Tartt's Goldfinch. I felt slimy, grimy reading these pages, as if I needed a bath but were handed a bucket and greasy sponge to dab off the filth of murder, theft, and rape.
Simenon embues his people's hearts dazed and confused by their circumstances with the dark, sludge, freezing aspects of the weather. There is no compassion only this pervasive delusional dispirited sense of survival. One crime escalates to another until there is no escape from the damage done.
I realize this sounds pretty depressing, and really it is, but it is so well written it wasn't the shock of the actions committed that offended me, but rather the acceptance of what life had thrown at them at the end of the way during Occupation. A complete acquiescence such a tragic tale
Every character in this book is absolutely repellent to me similar to Tartt's Goldfinch. I felt slimy, grimy reading these pages, as if I needed a bath but were handed a bucket and greasy sponge to dab off the filth of murder, theft, and rape.
Simenon embues his people's hearts dazed and confused by their circumstances with the dark, sludge, freezing aspects of the weather. There is no compassion only this pervasive delusional dispirited sense of survival. One crime escalates to another until there is no escape from the damage done.
I realize this sounds pretty depressing, and really it is, but it is so well written it wasn't the shock of the actions committed that offended me, but rather the acceptance of what life had thrown at them at the end of the way during Occupation. A complete acquiescence such a tragic tale
February 24, 2012
Frank Friedmaier is not quite twenty years old. World War II is raging but for some reason that is never specified, Frank is a civilian and not a soldier. His country, apparently France, has been occupied by enemy forces. Most of the citizens are barely scraping by, but Frank lives in his mother's small whorehouse which caters principally to officers of the occupation army. Frank, his mother and the mother's whores have ample food and other necessities. Mainly, they have ample coal to stay warm through a bitterly cold winter. Needless to say, most of their neighbors hate them, but the neighbors are powerless to do anything about this situation since Frank's mother is obviously protected by the authorities.
Frank is totally self-absorbed and is determined to make a name for himself. He runs with a rough crowd and as the book opens, he kills a man just for the thrill of it. Frank is also insensitive to the women in his life, his mother included, and constantly takes advantage of the young women in his mother's "employ," totally heedless of any thoughts or feelings that the women might have. Frank is particularly insensitive to a young female neighbor who, for some inexplicable reason, has a crush on him.
Dirty Snow is a novel that contains a great deal of criminal activity but it is not a crime novel in the traditional sense. Rather, it is an exploration of character. We never really know for sure the forces that have combined to make Frank the young man that he has become. Was it the war? Was it the fact that he grew up the fatherless son of a woman who exploited other women? Was it the other low-lifes with whom he associated or some combination thereof?
Whatever the case, it's interesting in a sick sort of way to watch the progress of Frank's life through the period covered by the book. It's like watching a dreadful accident taking place in slow motion right in front of your eyes. It's not remotely pretty, but you can't look away. George Simenon has sketched some memorable characters and placed them in a well-conceived universe. The end of the book dragged a bit for me, but the first two-thirds of it will linger in my memory for a long time to come.
Frank is totally self-absorbed and is determined to make a name for himself. He runs with a rough crowd and as the book opens, he kills a man just for the thrill of it. Frank is also insensitive to the women in his life, his mother included, and constantly takes advantage of the young women in his mother's "employ," totally heedless of any thoughts or feelings that the women might have. Frank is particularly insensitive to a young female neighbor who, for some inexplicable reason, has a crush on him.
Dirty Snow is a novel that contains a great deal of criminal activity but it is not a crime novel in the traditional sense. Rather, it is an exploration of character. We never really know for sure the forces that have combined to make Frank the young man that he has become. Was it the war? Was it the fact that he grew up the fatherless son of a woman who exploited other women? Was it the other low-lifes with whom he associated or some combination thereof?
Whatever the case, it's interesting in a sick sort of way to watch the progress of Frank's life through the period covered by the book. It's like watching a dreadful accident taking place in slow motion right in front of your eyes. It's not remotely pretty, but you can't look away. George Simenon has sketched some memorable characters and placed them in a well-conceived universe. The end of the book dragged a bit for me, but the first two-thirds of it will linger in my memory for a long time to come.
January 18, 2018
Gerçekten sıradışı bir kitap. Konusu çok orijinal gelmeyebilir ilk anda, ancak okudukça nasıl bir derinlikle konunun ilginç bir yöne kaydığını göreceksiniz. Polisiye romanları ile tanınan Simenon bu eserinde farklı bir tarz izlemiş, gerçi yine cinayetler, sorgular, işkenceler gibi unsurlar kitapta yer alsa da farklı mekan ve kişiler kullanarak klasik polisiyeden ayırmış. Yalnızlık duygusu içindeki bir insanın ruh halini çok güzel aktarıyor. Hapisteki sorgulamalar insanın dayanma gücü hakkında ilginç saptamalar içeriyor ve heyecanla okunuyor. Özellikle soru cümlelerinin varlığı hem merak duygusunu arttırıyor hem de okuru düşünmeye sevkediyor. Sonu da kitabın akışına uygun olarak düşündürerek ve sorgulayarak bitiyor.
August 22, 2018
I can't do better in a review than the Goodreads description, which says it all. A dark, hopeless book with a despicable main character, who described himself at the end as "a piece of shit" to his interrogators, it's also a fascinating look at the interior of his mind, shallow as it may be.
This is my first Georges Simenon novel, not one of his Inspector Maigret series, but I'm a new fan.
This is my first Georges Simenon novel, not one of his Inspector Maigret series, but I'm a new fan.
July 26, 2022
Simenon es conocido por sus novelas policiales, en particular por las del Inspector Maigret.
En este caso, cuenta una historia humana, situada en un pais ocupado, cruda por momentos, y que alcanza una gran profundidad. Excelente.
En este caso, cuenta una historia humana, situada en un pais ocupado, cruda por momentos, y que alcanza una gran profundidad. Excelente.
September 15, 2022
The Snow Was Dirty (aka Dirty Snow) is one of Georges Simenon's Roman Durs (hard novels). These are very different from his more famous Maigret novels. Simenon didn't view these as commercial in nature and felt no need to make concessions to morality or popular taste.
I'd already been impressed by a couple of Simenon's other Roman Durs (The Mahé Circle and The Hand) and so came to The Snow Was Dirty with high expectations.
Like the other Roman Durs, The Snow Was Dirty is bleak and noirish.
Frank Friedmaier is a listless 19 year old sociopath who lives in his mother's brothel in a small, nondescript occupied town.
Simenon brilliantly evokes the abject poverty, hunger and desperation faced by the town's citizens, and the resentment they feel towards Frank and his mother, who circumvent the rationing and live the high life. Frank feels untouchable and embarks upon a spree of violent, petty crime.
So how can a bleak book about a lowlife thug be so extraordinary?
It's a page turner, brilliantly written, and Frank is a fully realised and credible character. His actions may be pointless and appalling, but they are wholly believable - a result of his stunted character and the confusion of life in an occupied country.
There's a lot more I could say about The Snow Was Dirty however I am reluctant to say too much as one of the pleasures of the book is not knowing what happens, particularly the bravura final third which is both unexpected and gets to the essence of the human condition.
Magnificent.
5/5
The Snow Was Dirty (aka Dirty Snow)
I'd already been impressed by a couple of Simenon's other Roman Durs (The Mahé Circle and The Hand) and so came to The Snow Was Dirty with high expectations.
Like the other Roman Durs, The Snow Was Dirty is bleak and noirish.
Frank Friedmaier is a listless 19 year old sociopath who lives in his mother's brothel in a small, nondescript occupied town.
Simenon brilliantly evokes the abject poverty, hunger and desperation faced by the town's citizens, and the resentment they feel towards Frank and his mother, who circumvent the rationing and live the high life. Frank feels untouchable and embarks upon a spree of violent, petty crime.
So how can a bleak book about a lowlife thug be so extraordinary?
It's a page turner, brilliantly written, and Frank is a fully realised and credible character. His actions may be pointless and appalling, but they are wholly believable - a result of his stunted character and the confusion of life in an occupied country.
There's a lot more I could say about The Snow Was Dirty however I am reluctant to say too much as one of the pleasures of the book is not knowing what happens, particularly the bravura final third which is both unexpected and gets to the essence of the human condition.
Magnificent.
5/5
The Snow Was Dirty (aka Dirty Snow)
September 17, 2018
My first from this most prolific author, I was immensely impressed. The mood is claustrophobic, entirely in the head of a young man feeling his oats in an occupied European city during the Second World War. It was published soon after the end of the war, thus has little of its historical context. Frank, a nineteen year old, drinks with other unsavories in the crime trade at night and comes home to sleep as he pleases with the girls employed by his manipulative madam of a mother. But he has something deeply wrong, beyond a young man’s lack of empathy that makes this a psychological mystery reminiscent of Camus’ The Stranger. Simenon has crafted a tightly wrapped gem, very stream of conscious, where Frank tries to figure it out. He cannot find meaning, nor does he expect to, such is his cynicism and hopelessness. He scratches for meaning but acting out in horrific ways, to find the feel of murder so that he can overcome it, taunting fate and even exposing himself to find the limits of his power. Some would say his carelessness is a call for help, such as when he signals to his neighbor, a possible father figure. This is what can happen when parental or moral guidance is absent. Without hope, and a fatalistic view of life, Frank is called in by either the Occupying police, or one of the local authorities, and he spends the rest of the book in confinement being tortured by an indefatigable old gentleman. The game of wits is on, and he is fighting for his life, as he is made well aware that he will be shot like the others once the information he holds is exhausted. Simenon’s skill at this point of the book is remarkable, as he immerses the reader in the head of the this young man, as he goes through moments of lucidity and strategy to the gradual unraveling that leads to his ultimate demise.
Overall, the writing is sharp and the plot revelations strategically managed such that this reader was enthralled. The cruelty and machinations of the young man’s mind may be inscrutable to more genteel sensibilities, but it rang true for me. It takes great skill to make the reader care about such a flawed protagonist, but I hoped for redemption till the end. A little bit like Nabokov’s Lolita in this regard. Here are some passages I found special:
p. 122/123: Regarding the new girl in his mom’s brothel: “Compared to the others, all the others they had ever had, she seemed like a thoroughbred. She was very small, slender, yet plump at the same time, with brown hair and golden skin without the slightest blemish. She made you think of a fine piece of goldsmith’s work. She was hardly eighteen yet already a thorough bitch.”
p. 130: Timo, the owner of the drinking establishment, tries to warn the young cocky Frank that there is risk afoot and more than meets the eye: “’Some of them seem powerful, and maybe for the moment they are. Be they’re never- and don’t forget it- as powerful as they pretend, because no matter how powerful they are, there are always others who are more powerful still. And they’re the ones you never hear about’”.
p. 196: Under torture, Frank considers his strategic options with his nemesis, the patient elderly interrogator: “The point was not to give in, not on principle, not to save anyone, not out of honor, but because one day, without even knowing why, he had decided not to give in. Did the old man also sleep with one eye open? A fish’s eye, perfectly round, without eyelids, fixed, while Frank deliberately, voluptuously pressed his belly into the earth as he would into a woman.”
p. 220: Toward the end, Frank finally experiences pangs of humanity: “There were many things he had done when he was still outside that he had erased from memory. Toward Minna, though, he felt something like a pang of guilt. He knew he had behaved disgustingly.”
Overall, the writing is sharp and the plot revelations strategically managed such that this reader was enthralled. The cruelty and machinations of the young man’s mind may be inscrutable to more genteel sensibilities, but it rang true for me. It takes great skill to make the reader care about such a flawed protagonist, but I hoped for redemption till the end. A little bit like Nabokov’s Lolita in this regard. Here are some passages I found special:
p. 122/123: Regarding the new girl in his mom’s brothel: “Compared to the others, all the others they had ever had, she seemed like a thoroughbred. She was very small, slender, yet plump at the same time, with brown hair and golden skin without the slightest blemish. She made you think of a fine piece of goldsmith’s work. She was hardly eighteen yet already a thorough bitch.”
p. 130: Timo, the owner of the drinking establishment, tries to warn the young cocky Frank that there is risk afoot and more than meets the eye: “’Some of them seem powerful, and maybe for the moment they are. Be they’re never- and don’t forget it- as powerful as they pretend, because no matter how powerful they are, there are always others who are more powerful still. And they’re the ones you never hear about’”.
p. 196: Under torture, Frank considers his strategic options with his nemesis, the patient elderly interrogator: “The point was not to give in, not on principle, not to save anyone, not out of honor, but because one day, without even knowing why, he had decided not to give in. Did the old man also sleep with one eye open? A fish’s eye, perfectly round, without eyelids, fixed, while Frank deliberately, voluptuously pressed his belly into the earth as he would into a woman.”
p. 220: Toward the end, Frank finally experiences pangs of humanity: “There were many things he had done when he was still outside that he had erased from memory. Toward Minna, though, he felt something like a pang of guilt. He knew he had behaved disgustingly.”
December 17, 2010
chilled me to the bone. It's amazing that the book I read before this (Main Street) was published in the same century, in fact only 20 odd years apart, for they are so entirely different. Main Street was about the possible effects, or the difficulties of 'civilising' a 'backwoods' community, charming and sad at the same time, the (First World) war a distant backdrop. Although beneath the surface racism lurks, everyone is moral, more or less as they see it. Here the (2nd world) war is very present - we are in occupied France - and everyone's life has been degraded, and morals are luxuries. The hero, Frank, is a nihilistic teenager who decides - on the first page - to kill someone, to see what it would be like. He lives with his mother, (but was brought up by a foster mother) who is a kind of whorehouse madam, dealing with the occupiers. Frank will sleep with the girls that come and go, but has an obsession with the father and daughter who live across the hall, an obsession he doesn't quite understand, and he allows the daughter, Sissy, who 'loves' him to think that he might be her boyfriend, taking her to the pictures etc, flashing the money and 'green card' that he has obtained from robbery, violence and intimidation. Halfway through he is jailed and the novel turns to a cat-and-mouse police procedural that is told entirely from Frank's p.o.v. and is excellent about the sensations of prison, the food, the view from his cell, his growing beard and the way he sleeps, sniffing his underarm to tell he's still him. Fucking brilliant stuff. Especially the way his mind works, his weird sense, not of 'honour' but of not giving anything away, of being 'hard'. The prison stuff reminded me a little of 'Hard rain Falling' although they are otherwise very different.
I'm at work and wasn't going to write this review until later when I can get some quotes together, but I just finished it on the train this morning and had to write something down about how the book had got straight into me like some mainlined drug. I will add, possibly change this review later..
later
I'm just repeating myself here, but let's face it, this is what i really like in a book, although books can thrill in other ways - the moments that you feel you are there, you are him, when for instance caught up in the heightened minutiae of prison life and everything the taste of the 'soup', the sound of prisoners being marched off to be shot, the feel of his knocked out teeth, the position of a desk in the interrogation room, the cigars smoked by the interrogator, the woman he glimpses in an flat across from the jail (a converted school), his various obsessions and strategies for keeping sane, all that enters you through the force or the elegance of the writing.
Hats doffed on every page. Gripping, sad and stinging, eye-opening, and all rings true.
I've just done my top ten books of 2010, but will have to add this to make it my top 12.
I'm at work and wasn't going to write this review until later when I can get some quotes together, but I just finished it on the train this morning and had to write something down about how the book had got straight into me like some mainlined drug. I will add, possibly change this review later..
later
I'm just repeating myself here, but let's face it, this is what i really like in a book, although books can thrill in other ways - the moments that you feel you are there, you are him, when for instance caught up in the heightened minutiae of prison life and everything the taste of the 'soup', the sound of prisoners being marched off to be shot, the feel of his knocked out teeth, the position of a desk in the interrogation room, the cigars smoked by the interrogator, the woman he glimpses in an flat across from the jail (a converted school), his various obsessions and strategies for keeping sane, all that enters you through the force or the elegance of the writing.
Hats doffed on every page. Gripping, sad and stinging, eye-opening, and all rings true.
I've just done my top ten books of 2010, but will have to add this to make it my top 12.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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