William2's Reviews > Dirty Snow

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.