The Snow Was Dirty
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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La neige était sale (1948) is a novel by Georges Simenon published by Presses de la Cité, one of his 'romans durs'. The action takes place in Occupied France.
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Plot
The story is that of Franck, a young man who lives in the brothel his mother keeps. One day he meets a young girl who lives with her father in the same house. She falls in love with him. He finds out she is a virgin. He sells her virginity to his friend Kromer. In the dark, she thinks she is making love to Franck. She finds out during the act that she is actually making love to Kromer and runs away. She becomes sick. Franck is locked away. He is tortured. In the end she and her father forgive him and he dies.
Adaptations
Translations
Dutch translation
Translated into Dutch as Het bloedspoor in de sneeuw.
Maurits Mok vertaling van La neige était sale is vreselijk.
Mok vertaalt enfance (childhood) als kindsheid (het verlies van mentale vermogens aan het eind van het leven waardoor ouderen even afhankelijk als kinderen worden) ipv kindertijd.
Kindsheid in English second childhood, dotage.
English translation
It was translated as Dirty Snow and The Snow Was Dirty (2016, tr. Howard Curtis).
Blurb from the NYRB edition:
- 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 Snow opens, 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.
