Buy used: $18.42

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Thursday, April 4 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Or fastest delivery Wednesday, April 3. Order within 2 hrs 25 mins

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by BookFarmerLLC

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Georges Simenon

Follow

Dirty Snow (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – August 31, 2003

by Georges Simenon (Author), Marc Romano (Translator), William T. Vollmann (Introduction)

128

See all formats and editions

Nineteen-year-old Frank Friedmaier lives in a country under occupation. Most people struggle to get by; Frank takes it easy in his mother's 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 Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Simenon maps a no man's land of the spirit in which human nature is driven to destruction—and redemption, perhaps, as well—by forces beyond its control.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

NYRB Classics
Publication date

August 31, 2003
Dimensions

5 x 0.6 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

1590170431
ISBN-13

978-1590170434
See all details

Georges Simenon
346
Paperback
1 offer from $12.64
Georges Simenon
132
Paperback
22 offers from $3.68
Georges Simenon
293
Paperback
33 offers from $5.78
Georges Simenon
465
Paperback
32 offers from $3.89
Tove Jansson
4,016
Paperback
99 offers from $2.98
Magda Szabo
3,199
Paperback
105 offers from $4.80

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Attention should be paid to the New York Review of Books' continuing reissues of Georges Simenon. Simenon was legendary both for his literary skill–four or five books every year for 40 years–and his sexual capacity, at least to hear him tell it. What we can speak of with some certainty are the novels, which are tough, rigorously unsentimental and full of rage, duplicity and, occasionally, justice. Simenon's tone and dispassionate examination of humanity was echoed by Patricia Highsmith, who dispensed with the justice. So far, the Review has published Tropic Moon, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, Red Lights, Dirty Snow and Three Bedrooms in Manhattan; The Strangers in the House comes out in November. Try one, and you'll want to read more.” –The Palm Beach Post

“What many regard as the finest of all noir novels…"--Tim Rutten, The Los Angeles Times

“Dirty Snow is an astonishing work....a bleak masterpiece, its darkness is as William T. Vollmann writes in a perceptive afterword, 'as solid and heavy as the interior of a dwarf star.'” --John Banville, The New Republic

“Dirty Snow is both exhilirating and taxing: exhilirating because it frees the reader to imagine unthinkable acts of violence and degradation and, if not to approve of them exactly, then at least to better understand their origin; and taxing because of the effort it takes to even visit Simenon’s nihilist world for a while. ... Dirty Snow has an eerie locomotion, an eerie appeal.” --Bill Eichenberger, Columbus Dispatch

“Simenon may not have thought much of humanity, but few writers have captured its squalid core the way he did.” --Time Out New York

“Extraordinary… Simenon demonstrates a rare mastery"--Anita Brookner

“A Master storyteller… Simenon gave to the puzzle story a humanity that it had never had before.”--Daily Telegraph

“The best mystery writer today is a Belgian who writes in French. His name is Georges Simenon.”--Dashiell Hammett

“A truly wonderful writer… marvellously readable, lucid, simple, absolutely in tune with that world he creates.”--Muriel Spark

“One of the very few novels to come out of German-occupied France that gets it exactly right.”--Hans Konning

“The great master of unease”--Marcel Clements, International Herald Tribune

“The gift of narration is the rarest of all gifts in the 20th century. Georges Simenon has that to the tips of his fingers.”--Thorton Wilder

“At his best, Simenon is an all-round master craftsman- ironic, disciplined, highly intelligent, with fine descriptive power. His themes are timeless in their preoccupation with the interrelation of evil, guilt and good; contemporary in their fidelity to the modern context and Gallic in precision, logic and a certain emanation of pain or disquiet. His fluency is of course astonishing. His life is itself a work by Simenon.” --Francis Steegmuller

“Georges Simenon is more than prolific. His psychological intensity and compression of style mark him as a leading writer of the Century.”-- The New York Times

"Georges Simenon is a recent discovery for me -- not the Maigret books, but what Simenon called his "romans durs", such as "Dirty Snow" and "Three Bedrooms in Manhattan" -- and hard they are indeed. The latest of these New York Review Books reissues, "Tropic Moon" (translated from the French by Marc Romano) is a dark masterpiece set among French colonials in heart-of-darkness Gabon in the early 1930s. Cruel, erotic, frightening and superb." -- John Banville, The Los Angeles Times

About the Author

Georges Simenon was one of the most popular and esteemed novelists of the 20th century. He wrote close to 200 novels, many devoted to the legendary Inspector Maigret.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics; Reprint, Subsequent edition (August 31, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1590170431
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1590170434
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.6 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #558,941 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4,459 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #9,886 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)
- #12,944 in Classic Literature & Fiction

Customer Reviews:
128

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Georges Simenon

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Georges Simenon is one of the most addictive and bestselling European authors of the 20th Century. His work consists of 391 titles, and he is best known as the creator of the fictional detective series consisting of 75 books featuring Inspector Maigret, translated into more than 50 languages and sold in more than 50 countries. There are over 800 million Simenon books sold worldwide and he is the most translated French speaking author of the 20th century and the second most translated author of all time in Italy after Shakespeare.

'A writer who, more than any other crime novelist, combined a high literary reputation with popular appeal' P.D. James

'My readings? I read Tout Simenon, and when I'm done, I start all over again' Claude Chabrol

Discover the Simenon community:

@SimenonUK

http://georgessimenon.co.uk/

http://simenon.com/

http://www.inspectormaigret.com/

Customer reviews

4 out of 5

128 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Kathryn Pon

What a Teenager Wants: Crime and Occupation WW2

Reviewed in the United States on March 11, 2015

Verified Purchase

Under Nazi occupation, children of the Depression, 18 year old Frank, his mother/brothel madam's 16-18 year old girl trainees and his 15 year old neighbor girl with a crush are on a fast track learning curve. The environment is harsh and survival hard. Newspapers and rags wrapped around the feet substitute for boots: the tannery was closed 15 years ago. Wealth has been expropriated by the occupiers, intellectuals work menial jobs. Daily life for the neighbors is standing in line for turnips, and crowded rooms freezing with little heat. Frank and his mother, through their criminal activities have ease, bedrooms, furniture, tons of coal, good food, money and influence/protection. Frank is spoiled, with prostitute/slaves kneeling at his feet and his mother intimidated by his "cold eyes", his murderous narcissism. Frank is awash with barely perceived, changeable urgings. Wanting to be seen by a fatherly witness. Hating innocence. Wanting to be feared, to affect, to test his own limits, to test the limits of those who matter to him. He is ambitious and descends quickly in immorality. His need for attention, his macho swagger eventually involves innocents, the Resistance, neighbors, intimates and criminal cohorts. Brought into the occupiers' murky bureaucracy of duplicity, arrest, torture and death. The sense is that the occupation is eating itself and that Liberation is not far away. Imprisoned, Frank remakes his idea of himself, a romance of tightlipped refusal and introjected paternal wisdom.
William Vollman's afterword provoked thought. I felt a great sense of specifics and place. The place of the first murder "Rue Verte", the Swedish knife, the older man Holst (common Danish name), a writer seeking anonymity. The snow deep, fresh girls from the country in the brothel, the mansion recently occupied, a rich brewer's daughter, a violinist accused of resistance, the torture and daily early morning firing squads without trials. From the beginning, the occupation, to me, not American but clearly Nazi and in Northern France or Alsace. In The Train Simenon wrote about Nazism in France and the ungenerous choice of an ordinary man in self preservation. Recent Nobel Prize winner Modiano writes of criminals in Vichy France in Suspended Sentences. This kind of fiction of characters under duress makes history live.
A conquered country is a dystopia where the invaders' laws are extractive. There civilian life is a nightmare of survival, underground resistance is moral and criminals can grow rich in corrupt complicity with the occupiers. From neuroscience, we know the teenage brain is still developing. Identity, personal morality, and sense of self still in formation. Frank in war occupied territory lives on a different edge from 19 year old Dorothea in Middlemarch. The punishment for unformed character, lack of discernment and bad choices is not the same.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Roger Brunyate

Cold and Depraved

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2015

Verified Purchase

In addition to his world famous Inspector Maigret detective series, Georges Simenon wrote a number of straight novels that he called "romans durs." Like the others, most of them deal with the world of crime, but this is crime seen through a darker lens, where there is no convenient detective to bring evildoers to justice. Instead, they have a way of watching over the criminal's shoulder as his moral degeneration drags him further and further down. But even with four or five of these books behind me (NYRB has done a great service in systematically reprinting them), I was unprepared for the abject depravity of DIRTY SNOW, written by Simenon in America in 1948, undoubtedly with memories of Occupation France behind him. Its protagonist, teenage hood Frank Friedmaier, the son of a brothel-keeper, commits his first murder in the opening chapter. Other crimes will follow, even more despicable than mere killing, until Frank finds himself imprisoned by the Occupation authorities, his spurious bravado fueled by a kind of perverse pride in what a piece of moral excrement he has become. It would be hard to imagine a more depressing trajectory. This Simenon is no Agatha Christie, but a darker, more sordid Dostoevsky, and I suppose there is some splendor in that.

I was inspired to get the book by a comment somebody made on one of my reviews of Patrick Modiano, the French Nobelist whose books all hark back to the WW2 Occupation, in which his father was apparently a collaborator with the Gestapo. This reader suggested that Simenon captured the true spirit of the Occupation better in this one book than in anything written by Modiano, and I have seen similar claims elsewhere. However, I cannot say that this is true. One thing that surprised me immediately was that, although all the characters in the book are referred to as "Monsieur," they all have German names: Friedmaier, Holst, Widemer, Rissl; the occupying forces, by contrast, are all anonymous. So the obvious assumption that this is German-occupied France is denied from the outset; this is a no-man's-land, closer to Kafka or Orwell than Simenon's usual stamping-grounds. Unfortunately by taking this approach, Simenon deprives himself of one of his biggest strengths -- a quality he very much shares with Modiano -- that of tying his action to a specific urban geography.

No, this is not a good picture of THE Occupation at all. But it does something else that is very much related to Modiano. The book is entirely set among a group of criminals, thieves, and murderers working out of a shady bar, for whom the Occupation is less an imposition than an opportunity. This is exactly the shady world which Patrick Modiano believed his father to have been a part of. Until reading him -- and now having it confirmed by Simenon -- I would not have thought that an occupation, while repressing normal life, might also have the effect of empowering the criminal underground. An interesting insight that I needed to read from two different authors to believe.

This NYRB edition features an appropriately dry translation by Marc Romano and Louise Varèse; the novelist William T. Vollmann has contributed a lengthy essay which, in happy contrast to most NYRB books, is printed as an afterword. In it, Vollmann makes a casual reference to Camus' THE STRANGER, and then dismisses it. But it fascinated me. Indeed, I cannot now ignore the possibility that Simenon was trying, within his own style, to emulate the example of Camus' masterpiece, published six years earlier. Both feature protagonists who are apparently devoid of normal social constraints. And both share the same shape: a first part featuring meaningless sex and random murder, and a second half in which the protagonist is in prison or on trial. Other than the surely deliberate replacement of sun-baked sand with its antithesis, dirty snow, the main difference comes in the second halves of the two books. Even as Camus' Meursault is confined to prison, the moral dimensions of the story seem to expand and gain resonance. You can see Simenon, I think, trying to do the same thing. He is no more going to allow himself an overt spiritual dimension than Camus was, yet he does not quite have the skill to find an alternative that would prevent these chapters from getting tedious. Still, it is interesting to watch such a good author venturing so far out of his comfort zone to tread in the footsteps of a truly great one.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Tess P

Highly Readable by a writer I should have discovered by now!

Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2016

Verified Purchase

This was a quick read for me. Love the NY Sunday Times book review, and in their weekly author interviews a few weeks ago the interviewee stated Dirty Snow was the best book he had read in 2015. I had never heard of Georges Simenon, so as I love to do, sitting at brunch bought this book via my mobile app. It's gritty, compelling, repulsive in some ways.......and have read up on Simenon since and it is said to be his 'masterpiece' by some. I don't know about that, but once again, read it quickly, and as I also love to discover in my reading (the ones that hold my interest), was taken to a different world; a different country with people I've never come across..... in such different times. Passed on it to another reader I know and last he told me he was engrossed in it too! Subsequently, since finishing this one by Simenon have bought two more of his novels.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on January 22, 2016

Verified Purchase

Disturbingly powerful, simple writing. Visceral.

D. Morris

An exceptional work

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 13, 2014

Verified Purchase

I never quite know if I'm using the term antihero correctly, but I offer Frank Friedmaier for your consideration. Frank is 19 years old, but he's gone far beyond the moral event horizon where a character like Pinkie Brown, damaged angel that he is, still hovers. We're only a few pages in before Frank has committed a spur-of-the-moment murder for motives that not even he knows. He has no pity, especially not for himself, and doesn't even attempt to turn on the charm that makes us root for an utter devil like Humbert Humbert. Most people he knows are afraid of him, and even the few who love him don't really like him much (with one possible exception, but no spoilers here). According to save-the-cat writing doctrine we should have no interest in Frank's future, just as he has no interest in it, but in fact he's fascinating - like a young John Lennon on the loose in his Berlin days, with only slightly fewer scruples.

The writing style is true hardboiled: spare but brilliantly evocative. The atmosphere of the setting (which I took to be Nazi-occupied France, but might be Allied-occupied Germany) is corrosive, bleak, and relentless. Brandon Robshaw's review in The Independent concluded: "Simenon ought to be spoken of in the same breath as Camus, Beckett and Kafka." On the strength of this, I agree.

(The New York Review edition is particularly fine, with pleasing typography, well-judged cover design, and high production standards. And a nice touch that shows the editors' consideration of the reader: William T Vollman's critique of the book is kept to the end rather than being a foreword which one then either has to skip, and possibly forget, or read with the risk of spoilers.)

8 people found this helpful

Frank Gordon

There's more to Simenon than Maigret

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 6, 2012

Verified Purchase

Simenon is perhaps the most under-rated novelist of the 20th century. I love his Maigret books and can never understand why they always seem to be out of print - I have re-read my collection over and over again.

But there is a lot more to Simenon than Maigret. His writing is incredibly simple, misleadingly so. Beneath the simplicity a whole world of feeling and action seeths and boils. His characters are often unpleasant and vicious, as in the character of Frank in 'Dirty Snow'. There is just a hint of redemption for Frank, but not much. We follow him on his downward spiral - and he starts pretty low down as it is. Yet we are fascinated, drawn inward and onward, spellbound by Simenon's writing - based,as it would seem, on a remarkable knowledge of our darkest inner workings.

There's no fun here and little in the way of humour; instead one feels gripped by the throat until finally the last page releases us to emerge into the fresh air once again. A great book.

One person found this helpful

Barton Keyes

A Work of Genius

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 18, 2014

Verified Purchase

Outstandingly good and quite unlike anything else by Simenon, Dirty Snow is a work of compete genius. If he had written nothing else in his life, Simenon should be remembered for this.

The story of Frank Friedmaier is the story of a man who finds his own redemption through a nobility of action that has nothing to do with his former life or character. (In that, Frank is a bit like Dickens' Sidney Carton). The story is brilliantly told without an unnecessary word or a superfluous paragraph. The descriptions of Frank's mental attitude during his incarceration are exceptionally good.

(Forget the laughably pompous "Afterword" written by a third-rate American novelist. It completely misses the point and will only spoil the story's effect)

One person found this helpful

B. Hannan

Simenon's Best?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 3, 2019

Verified Purchase

Quite an extraordinary book to discover even if you have ready many other works by Simenon. Set in a fictional Occupied Country, it tells the story of a young psychopath and the impact of his actions on the lives of those around him. The young man is both ruthlessly and sympathetically portrayed, growing up in a small brothel giving him contempt for females, but his own early life providing an indication of how he could turn out the way he did.

See more reviews

Follow the author

Dirty Snow (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – August 31, 2003

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Georges Simenon

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries