jess walter's reading tip

Sentimentality may be the hardest thing to excise entirely from fiction. Our own humanity pushes us toward caring, even rooting—and eventually, toward artificiality. We can find relief in the dark humor of Kafka’s The Trial, in the awareness of evil (and therefore good) in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, in the nihilistic charm of Celine, in the unmistakeable anti-war stance of books like Johnny Got His Gun and All Quiet on the Western Front—these qualities create a safe distance from which to safely observe the darkness. 

In George Simenon's 1948 classic, Dirty Snow (The Snow Was Dirty or La Neige était Sale), there is no distance, so safe space to hide from the horror. The Belgian-born Simenon achieved the near-impossible: crafting a wildly compelling story with no relief from its inherent bleakness and inhumanity. It is a remarkable achievement for this fact and for another: you can’t put it down. In close, vital, third-person prose, we fall in with a cold, seemingly amoral protagonist, a 19-year-old named Frank Friedmaier, who grows up in a brothel and lives a short life of utter corruption and matter-of-fact cruelty, perfectly suited to an unnamed place and time that parallels the Nazi occupation of Western Europe. It also speaks to this moment in history, at least for an American horrified by his own nation’s amoral leadership. 

I read Dirty Snow (translated from the French by Marc Romano and Louise Varese) on a recent trip to Europe and found myself haunted by it, sleepless some nights, puzzled by its dark attraction and by its stubborn insistence on the meaninglessness of humanism.

I told my wife after finishing it. And then, I started it all over again. 

illustration © valentine lafitte

picture: jess walter © rajah bose