This novel, recently reissued as _Dirty Snow_, 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 who Simenon shows knowing and offering love and
mutuality. The authorities could be municpal police as easily
as military secret police. The protagonist, Frank, a 17year
old hoodlum, thief, 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), and
deliberately puts himself beyond the reach of them, or of any
kind of life. He is under arrest, wants to be tortured, and
sees himself as wanting and deserving death. I'm not sure
exactly what happens to Frank at the end. He could have
gotten out of custody, and enjoyed the love of the man he
sees as a father figure, and of the man's daughter. Somehow
Frank had defined all this as weakness, or perhaps as
experiences shut off to him by the very fact that he is the
young man he is. Puzzling, noir, and mysterious.
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