Dirty Snow

Rating:
Summary: Too bleak?
Review: I picked this up because the back copy compared it to Jim Thompson. The comparison is apt -- Simenon, like Thompson, writes seemingly simple prose laced with menace -- but it doesn't hold up. You can tell Simenon is writing on autopilot some of the time here. Still, when he's fully on, this book is as scary as they come.

Rating:
Summary: Disturbing, Riveting
Review: This book is pure noir. It is as disturbing as Thompson's The Killer Inside of Me, with perhaps more insight and thought. Simenon's descriptions of the "occupation" (is it by Germany or the US?) are vivid. Be warned that this is not a conventional mystery. But it is a masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: heroic self testing and self hatred
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: heroic self testing and self hatred
Review: 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.