Georges Simenon, The snow was dirty [1948] , Milano, Adelphi, 2009
"For roads and streets / I try my love. / I've tried, But I could not find. / I met the guards / that made the rounds in the city. / I asked them: "Have you seen my love?". " Some novels evoke a sense of cold that will not go away. As in this beautiful novel by Simenon. It's not just the snow that winter freezing of some European city names German foreign occupation subject to a long, silent and oppressive. Nor is it only that snow in the alley one night Frank Friedmaier crouches to stab a sergeant of the occupants. Frank is not a fanatic, nor a shaker or a patriot . Frank, eighteen, wants to be a man. Not to enter the underworld: that he wants is his destiny to hunt down, chase him, challenge him, something unknown, something absent, too far beyond a mother's brothel madam, too beyond those girls with the mother which sometimes goes to bed, fall in love with him and that only proves irrelevant nuisance, or even the Timo adventurous patrons of the bar, easy money, dirty business, collaboration penny. doubling the promontory, looking out the other side. Yet while crouching with a knife in his hand, his life intersects with that of the neighbor, Gerhardt Holst, one of those men who are ashamed of not being like the others and take that air humble, quiet, that does not look at anyone, all concentrated in the aluminum cans for lunch, that object that links him to the mundane daily, Sissy, teenage daughter, perhaps the remains of a past wealthy. Yet between the two men running a link that Frank feels, and looks, without explain it. There are Holst and he . Frank travels the road that leads to the ferocity and coldness, detachment, refusal, no anger, no pity for himself or for others, only indifferent determination. But all along the icy path of Frank Sissy - that little girl in love with him, who has come to make love like a mouse , which is resurgence of guilt, of a dull pain of betrayal - and the Holst, which without that it understands the reason he has not betrayed. Figure obsessive of a world different from that for which he feels only disgust. And that destiny searched in blood and frost arrives unexpectedly one morning, the last thing I would have thought. Trapped in a prison. In total solitude. Interrogation unpredictable, mysterious, whose plot Frank struggles to understand. A sort of chess News, silence, solitude, even on treatment, world unto itself, its own laws, that Frank has to invent, to discover something hitherto unknown to him, the true meaning of words. Jaromir Hladik, it The secret miracle Borges, in the courtyard of the barracks where the Gestapo is about to be shot, gets a year of time to complete immobility of his tragedy: "I do not work for posterity and not for God , of whose literary preferences he knew little. Meticulous, property, secret, ordered in time its high invisible maze. " Just put the last word, the drop on the cheek to slide back, and rips the fourfold saves. Frank can not resist the interrogation to be saved, not forcing a strict discipline to get out of jail. He does it to win the smell of earth, living thing, all that has never had, do not expect to have. What he sees from the cell, is a distant window. And there is life. What I did not, who knows now that will not. In some parts of the city there is a man who leaves in the morning with the certainty of the evening to find that woman and the baby in its cradle, and a bed with their odors. A man for whom she prepares a daily aluminum cans for lunch. That woman at the window, which gives the title to the third and final part of the novel, so similar and so far the man at the window, the last thing seen by the prosecutor Prague Josef K., is the life he sought. This time there is no need, like Jaromir Hladik, a final word that seals the end of a search, just won a match from that lot that has hated all his life. And down in the courtyard, when the time comes, then we will raise the collar, like everyone else, for once, like everyone else, and she will soon, to save for once, the cold the other fellow. "Come, my love, my beautiful, come on. / It's over the winter, / The rain has ended. "
Thank gbrlbldssr
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