Dirty Snow (New York Review Books Classics)

Dirty Snow (New York Review Books Classics) by Georges Simenon. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781590170434.

Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mothers whorehouse, which caters to members of the occupying forces. But Frank is restless. He is a pimp, a thug, a petty thief, and, as Dirty Snowopens, he has just killed his first man. Through the unrelenting darkness and cold of an endless winter, Frank will pursue abjection until at last there is nowhere 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." In a study of the criminal mind that is comparable to Jim Thompsons The Killer Inside Me, Simenon maps a no mans land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction—and redemption, perhaps, as well—by forces beyond its control.