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.
--Georges Simenon, The Snow Was Dirty, translated by Howard Curtis (Penguin 1948)
This roman dur is bleaker than Camus, Graham Greene, Kafka and Orwell put together. The lead character is Frank Friedmaier, son of a brothel owner, nineteen years old and a murderer in an unnamed country occupied by an unnamed occupying force. The book was written by Simenon after WWII when Simenon fled to America to avoid questioning about possible collaboration with the Germans, still a subject of controversy.
Though the book is written in the third person it is seen from Frank's point of view, as he recruits prostitutes, whom he mistreats in his mother's brothel, and kills officials and shopkeepers for both fun and profit, though none of the violence is shown directly. Frank flaunts his misbehavior and is eventually arrested, interrogated and executed, all of which he accepts fatalistically. There is no redemption for Frank, whose mother's brothel was protected by the occupiers while most citizens stood in long freezing cold lines for food and scrounged for coal.
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