Dirty Snow (30 page)

So perhaps the note is supposed to be false. “Sissy was in him,” Simenon ecstatically oozes. “She had come. She was there. She was in him. His. Holst had given them his blessing.” But let's not forget that Frank has no use for Sissy.

Where does all this leave us? Lost in the dirty snow.

Indeed, the more we try to find landmarks in the novel, the more lost we get. In its dreamy, stifling, menacing vagueness,
Dirty Snow
reminds me of the work of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, whose constructions tend to fall through their own subbasements into the dungeons of alternate universes.

Who is Frank Friedmaier?
Where
is he? The occupation authorities, whom at first from Frank's German-sounding last name I thought to be Americans at the end of World War II, gradually show themselves to be harsher than any American command. The names of other people, not to mention the streets, likewise baffle us into dead ends—are we in Germany, Belgium, or France?

What was he actually arrested for? We never know for certain how much the authorities have on him. After all, that doesn't matter. In one of his prison interrogations it becomes clear that the source of those marked bills he earned for his murder-robbery is of extreme interest to the interrogator. Simenon wants us to believe, such is his ugly vision of the world, that the occupiers are so corrupt that tracking illicit disbursements is more important to them than the murder of the Eunuch. Still, maybe it was the murder which impelled them to bring him in. Well, what's the difference? If that crime didn't in and of itself lead to Frank's arrest, it commenced a string of in-your-face follies which eventually did doom Frank. All of them were vile, and all were meaningless. So why do we need to know?

Who turned him in? We can't be sure of that, either. Maybe no one; maybe the authorities were watching him all along. Probably not his mother, but we can't entirely dismiss her. With good reason, she fears his lethal anger and coldness, which might be cause for saving herself; she's an exploiter who's callously disregardful of her girls' health (the episode with the whore whose “plumbing” gets damaged by Otto is especially telling); she has an understanding of some kind with the inspector, who might be Frank's father; she turns her brothel into an information-gathering apparatus for the occupiers. One of the nastiest characters in this book, she turns country girls into whores, then, once they've become stale and blowsy, demotes them to household drudges and finally kicks them out; Simenon remarks that the girls arrive thinking they've found haven in her warm, food-rich apartment. She “knew how to train them.” To be sure, she loves Frank, or believes that she does; and she caters to him; indeed, she is a major factor in his spoiling. She has fed him with the corruption he regurgitates, which is why, as I said,
he wants to be hated
—a surefire way to get others to
see
him, to be real, to actually catch the eye, like a blot of fresh red blood on the dirty snow. Indeed, most people do hate him. Therefore, the question of who might have turned him in can be answered: Anybody and everybody—except the two who had most cause: Holst and Sissy.

What do we know about Frank? Almost nothing. What is there to know? The same. Given all that it does not say,
Dirty Snow
succeeds quite surprisingly in being a classic bildungsroman, a novel of development. By the end, Frank is asking himself: “Were they going to make him the kind of offer Lotte had accepted? … What would he do if they asked him outright? … What would Holst do?”

But this is not quite the great moment of moral redemption which we tend to encounter in the bildungsroman—or is it? Calmly, defiantly, Frank informs the interrogator: “I am not a fanatic, an agitator, or a patriot. I am a piece of shit … I want to die, as soon as possible, in whatever fashion you choose.”

What makes
Dirty Snow
so depressing and so true is that Frank is a piece of shit who does deserve to die. In the end, he has learned to know himself; nothing more is left to him. Like the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg who admitted to their crimes, he has achieved the only kind of heroism which is still open to him: he admits that he is ruined and evil through and through. He stands by himself. His moral and intellectual development, such as it is, has been the explicit assumption of the evilness which he has long since arrogated.

When the book first opens he has not killed anyone; he has not committed the worst betrayal of all, the seduction and proxy rape of Sissy. Nor, I repeat, was there ever any need for him to do these things. When I had only read a few pages of
Dirty Snow
, Frank reminded me of Camus' protagonist in
The Stranger
, who kills for no reason. But all around him a cruel and evil occupying force from some unnamed country is oppressing and killing. Frank is less “absurd” than the Stranger, less out of place. In spite of his privileged existence, he too is contaminated by the terrible struggle for life. The only experience available to people in Frank's country, so it would seem, the only form of maturing and growing, is being corrupted. And all that Holst's proxy fatherhood can give

Frank in the end is empirical validation of his own badness. There's destiny for you! No wonder Frank hates it. Can anything get much worse than this?

—W
ILLIAM
T. V
OLLMANN

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

La Neige était sale
copyright © 1948 by Georges Simenon Limited, a Chorion Company

Translation by Marc Romano and Louise Varèse entitled
Dirty Snow

copyright © 1951, 2003 by Georges Simenon Limited, a Chorion Company

Afterword copyright © 2003 by William T. Vollmann

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Pierre Huyghe,
Les Grandes Ensembles

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Simenon, Georges, 1903–

  [Neige était sale. English]

  Dirty snow / by Georges Simenon ; translated by Marc Romano ;

afterword by William T. Vollmann.

      p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 1-59017-043-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Romano, Marc. II. Title. III. Series.

  PQ2637.I53N4313 2003

  843'.912—dc21

2003013762

eISBN tk
v1.0

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