Product Description

Dirty Snow, widely acknowledged as one of Simenon's finest books, is a study of the criminal mind comparable to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. It tells the story of Frank, a pimp, a petty thief, and collaborator in occupied France. Through the long and unrelenting cold and darkness of a long winter Frank pursues all the possibilites of perdition until at last there is nowhere left 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." 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62776 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-31
• Released on: 2003-08-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781590170434
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Every artist has a personality, his own spectacles . . . Simenon’s spectacles may be said to be of pure glass, distorting nothing." -- —Patricia Highsmith, New York Times Book Review, 1969

"One of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right." -- Hans Koning

"The king of the noir novels." -- William Vollmann

"[Simenon] is regarded by his greatest admirers as a novelist comparable with Balzac." -- —Julian Symons

Review
“Attention should be paid to the New York Review of Books' continuing reissues of Georges Simenon. Simenon was legendary both for his literary skill–four or five books every year for 40 years–and his sexual capacity, at least to hear him tell it. What we can speak of with some certainty are the novels, which are tough, rigorously unsentimental and full of rage, duplicity and, occasionally, justice. Simenon's tone and dispassionate examination of humanity was echoed by Patricia Highsmith, who dispensed with the justice. So far, the Review has published Tropic Moon, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, Red Lights, Dirty Snow and Three Bedrooms in Manhattan; The Strangers in the House comes out in November. Try one, and you'll want to read more.” –The Palm Beach Post

“What many regard as the finest of all noir novels…"--Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times

“Dirty Snow is an astonishing work....a bleak masterpiece, its darkness is as William T. Vollmann writes in a perceptive afterword, 'as solid and heavy as the interior of a dwarf star.'” --John Banville, The New Republic

“Dirty Snow is both exhilirating and taxing: exhilirating because it frees the reader to imagine unthinkable acts of violence and degradation and, if not to approve of them exactly, then at least to better understand their origin; and taxing because of the effort it takes to even visit Simenon’s nihilist world for a while. ... Dirty Snow has an eerie locomotion, an eerie appeal.” --Bill Eichenberger, Columbus Dispatch

“Simenon may not have thought much of humanity, but few writers have captured its squalid core the way he did.” --Time Out New York

“Extraordinary… Simenon demonstrates a rare mastery"--Anita Brookner

“A Master storyteller… Simenon gave to the puzzle story a humanity that it had never had before.”--Daily Telegraph

“The best mystery writer today is a Belgian who writes in French. His name is Georges Simenon.”--Dashiell Hammett

“A truly wonderful writer… marvellously readable, lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates.”--Muriel Spark

“One of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right.”--Hans Konning

“The great master of unease”--Marcel Clements, International Herald Tribune

“The gift of narration is the rarest of all gifts in the 20th century. Georges Simenon has that to the tips of his fingers.”--Thorton Wilder

“At his best, Simenon is an all-round master craftsman- ironic, disciplined, highly intelligent, with fine descriptive power. His themes are timeless in their preoccupation with the interrelation of evil, guilt and good; contemporary in their fidelity to the modern context and Gallic in precision, logic and a certain emanation of pain or disquiet. His fluency is of course astonishing. His life is itself a work by Simenon.” --Francis Steegmuller

“Georges Simenon is more than prolific. His psychological intensity and compression of style mark him as a leading writer of the Century.”-- The New York Times

"Georges Simenon is a recent discovery for me -- not the Maigret books, but what Simenon called his "romans durs", such as "Dirty Snow" and "Three Bedrooms in Manhattan" -- and hard they are indeed. The latest of these New York Review Books reissues, "Tropic Moon" (translated from the French by Marc Romano) is a dark masterpiece set among French colonials in heart-of-darkness Gabon in the early 1930s. Cruel, erotic, frightening and superb." -- John Banville, The Los Angeles Times

About the Author
Georges Simenon was one of the most popular and esteemed novelists of the 20th century. He wrote close to 200 novels, many devoted to the legendary Inspector Maigret.

Customer Reviews

heroic self testing and self hatred
This novel is set in an occupied European city (Paris? The names are Germanic) during WWII (it was first published in 1950). I can certainly see it as a powerful portrait of a people under surveillance, living in poverty, going through a numbing routine of survival with no sense of getting control of their lives. Then, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague; today, Kabul or Bagdad. Is this the only way to read the novel? I do not think so.

There is no political resistance, no underground. No one speaks for the city or nation which is occupied. There are some citizens whom Simenon shows knowing and offering love and mutuality. The authorities could be municipal police as easily as military secret police. The protagonist, Frank, a 17year old hoodlum, thief, thrill-killer, and accessory to murder, is the son of a madam who lives with her girls in an apartment house. Frank is determined to test himself and his inner resources, and the way he chooses, maybe the only way available, is to prove he has the power to remain unmoved by various cruelties and evils he perpetrates. He does what he does by free, rational choice, in cold blood and without remorse. He's hard boiled to the core. And yet, clearly at the end of the book he punishes, and has punished, himself. He is in search of a father (Mr Holst) and a lover (Holst's daughter Sissy), like every young man, but he deliberately puts himself beyond the reach of them, or of any kind of life. He wants to be tortured, and sees himself as wanting and deserving death. I'm not sure exactly what happens to Frank at the end, although he may be about to be executed. Somehow Frank had defined love and fatherly affection as weakness, or perhaps as experiences shut off to him by the very fact that he is the young man he is. Puzzling, noir, mysterious. And a powerful existential novel.

Despair is an expression of the total personality
doubt only of thought. Soren Kierkegaard

Frank Friedmaier, the protagonist of Georges Simenon's novel "Dirty Snow" seems to have no doubts about his life. In fact he seems to be more a creature of base animal instinct than of anything resembling thought. If he has doubts about anything they are not evident. But his words and deeds bespeak an unconscious despair so profound that the reader can feel it with every page.

Simenon was nothing if not prolific in both his literary and public life. Born in Belgium in 1903, Simenon turned out hundreds of novels. Simenon's obsession with writing caused him to break off an affair (he was prolific in this area of his life as well) with the celebrated Josephine Baker in Paris when he could only write twelve novels in the twelve month period in which they were involved. Although perhaps best known for his Inspector Maigret detective novels, Simenon also wrote over a hundred novels that he referred to as `romans durs' (literally "hard novels"). "Dirty Snow" is one of Simenon's hard novels and to call it noir is an understatement. "Dirty Snow" is darker than noir, devoid of any light or optimism. In the hands of Simenon it is an absorbing (entertaining seems an inapt word) look at the darker side of life.

Frank Friedmaier lives in his mother's brothel in a small apartment building. The brothel is in an unnamed city in occupied France during World War II. Frank divides his time between the brothel and a local bar inhabited by an assortment of shady characters that include low level criminals, women of `easy virtue', and the occasional German soldier. When he returns home at night he camps down with whichever one of his mother's employees suits his fancy. What follows may best be described as nasty, brutish, and short. There is no affection, not even feigned affection, just feral activity.

The book follows Frank's descent into increasingly lower levels of behavior. He decides the time has come to kill a man, lies in wait in some snow that had been dirtied by the day's activities, and then takes a knife to a German soldier and stabs him to death. He reveals his presence to a passing neighbor, the father of a young girl who Frank seems to like, just so that the neighbor will know that Frank has murdered the soldier. Frank is confident that the neighbor will keep the information to himself. Frank next plans a robbery. The robbery is successful but Frank soon finds himself in a German prison subject to repeated interrogations. By the end of the book Frank has completed a journey that has taken him on a journey through what Dante would have considered different layers of hel l.

The fascinating aspect of Dirty Snow for me lay in the narration. Simenon has pulled off a neat trick here. The narrator is Frank and we are privy to his innermost thoughts, such as they are. Yet it is the absence of thought and the inability to evince any feeling in a rational manner that grabs the reader. There are sections, particularly those involving the daughter of the neighbor who witnessed the killing, where you can almost sense that Frank would like to act on a normal level with normal emotions. He may come close but he always retreats. As Dirty Snow ends, in a courtyard in the prison, Simenon has Frank perform one simple act involving an article of clothing. It is an act that Frank has long observed of the other prisoners. His instinctive performance of that act brings Franks journey and the book to its inevitable end.

Dirty Snow is a fascinating, if dark, look at one small aspect of the human condition. I found it well worth reading. L. Fleisig

Catching It Where The Chicken Catches The Axe
Georges Simenon's Dirty Snow (1948) is a grim, claustrophobic, if somewhat typical, examination of the human psyche by the Belgian master of the psychological novel. Taking place in an unnamed country existing under the occupation of an amoral foreign power, Dirty Snow depicts a fallen, sordid world which is equal parts Franz Kafka, Jean Rhys, and Jean Genet, though Simenon's protagonist, Frank Friedmaier, lacks the transcendent spiritual insight which elevated Genet's antiheroes above the common thief, corner boy, street thug, and murderer.

Dirty Snow is the story of a spoiled, narcissistic, and unfocused sociopath whose boredom with his own aimless existence leads him to casually manipulate, abuse, rob, or murder a number of innocent neighborhood citizens. Like the characters in Genet, Frank kills because he wants to, because the male cronies he admires boast that they have committed murders of their own, and because he wants to establish some definite marker in his history to justify his life to himself.

Oddly obsessed with Holst, his older male neighbor across the hall, Frank, who lives with his shrewish, brothel-keeping mother, seduces and then casts aside naïve young Sissy, Holst's daughter, for the sheer sport of it. But Frank's seduction of Sissy is also partially an act of unrealized homosexual sublimation, as absolutely nothing Frank does arouses Holst's attention. Though Holst all but witnesses Frank committing his first murder, and could reasonably assume that Frank is the person who has violated his daughter's body, health, and spirit during his absence, Holst remains utterly passive.

Dirty Snow is one of Simenon's more critically respected novels, but while the first two-thirds are gripping and suspenseful, the last third, in which Frank is arrested and incarcerated by the occupying administration, is dull, undramatic, and far too long. In The Miracle of the Rose (1951), Genet brought his solitary prisoners to vibrant, shadow-casting life; but Frank's incarceration plods on uneventfully for over 60 pages, and Frank completely lacks the rich inner fabric of Genet's "saints," dreaming social misfits, transvestites, and randy, strutting alpha males. It is difficult to fathom why Simenon chose to conclude the novel as he does, since the anticlimactic ending deflates a book which had the potential to become a minor classic.