Artificial Snow

by Florian Zeller, Sue Dyson (Translation)

Artificial Snow is centred on the narrator’s love for Lou, a woman with whom he had a brief relationship and who has become an obsession. When his dreams of rekindling their lost love, and of living happily ever after, seem impossible, he imagines instead wrecking the worst acts of vengeance against her. This is a novel that ponders the despair of living in a world devoid of love and true companionship.

“Where goes the white, when melts the snow?” asks the epigraph. It turns to sludge, Zeller suggests, and nothing will ever be as simple and good as it used to be. Zeller draws an urbane, witty portrait of the life of twenty-something Parisians, describing their insecurities, their preoccupations and their egotism.

Genres: Fiction, France

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2002

About the author

Florian Zeller is a French novelist and playwright. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, including English. He won the Prix Interallié in 2004 for his novel "Fascination of Evil" ("La Fascination du Pire").

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

Young, apparently irresistible Frenchman wanders around rainy streets of Paris, sleeping with lots of women and pining over a lost love. While doing this he miraculously hits upon the philosophical connection between sex and death and tells us that Santa's red costume was really an invention of Coca Cola. Apparently "nobody knows that." Author, whose jacket photo is the size and style an eighties soap actor
headshot, makes witty cameos as narrator's friend.

I read the whole thing. I am sad and need a Coke.

[The Sporty Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ceci est l'histoire d'un désamour, d'une rupture, d'un abandon. L'être aimé ne veut plus du narrateur et celui-ci sombre dans la vacuité et a dépression. Il essaie de trouver des remèdes mais il n'y en a pas. Il envisage le meurtre, couche avec une autre femme, retrouve une vie sociale sans intérêt. Enfin, une fiction réaliste qui ne vend pas du rêve avec une fin heureuse inepte. La fin n'est pas heureuse car il n'y en a pas. C'est le vide, telle une vie vide de sens quand l'on n'a plus de raison intense de vivre.

[aoife …]

this book was such a boring book. nothing happened it was just an annoying privileged man obsessing over a woman and sexualising all other women.

[Monica Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I sometimes discovered relics of hope embedded in me like fossils in ancient stone, an odd collection of elements that everything seemed to repudiate."

"My moral decline was beautiful, since it hadn't taken me away from her for too long; beautiful, because beauty is never what you head towards, but what you come back to."

"I belong to the generation of assassins. Of those who, come spring, have forgotten why they should feel emotion."

These are just a sampling of the sentences I loved from Florian Zeller's debut novel, Artificial Snow. Zeller's , an intellectual French phenom and a mere twenty-two years old when this was published,gives us a narrator who is a bourgeois young man brokenhearted over the break-up, breakdown of a relationship with a woman named Lou. The narrator is the universal young male from anywhere with good looks, money and intelligence - a bit arrogant, self-absorbed, and possessing an extremely healthy libido. He always has a woman to sate his physical needs, but the one woman he can't get over is Lou who he dated for a couple of months. Zeller sets up his novel of rejection with an opening scene of missing the metro, the last metro. It gives him an allegory to frame his perceived failure and depression:

"The recurrence of these incidents seem to give them a mystical significance. Along the lines: everybody's gone, except you; or: you're the only one waiting for a train that's just gone, again."

There is an honesty, a perscipacity and a ruminative tone through this slight novel that inveigles the reader, makes you fall for his selfish behavior, his attempts to gratify his ego through the pain of Lou's rejection. We never get a clear sense of Lou, of why she was different than other women for him. We just know that she was and to let go of that first love is the most difficult. We read as Zeller's narrator drinks himself into pain numbing stupors, mechanically seduces women without gratification to give him reprieve from loneliness for a night and my personal favorite, call out from work and lie in bed all day because anything else is too much of an effort.

By no means is this a perfect novel, but the comparison to Francoise Sagan and her success with Bonjour Tristesse is easy to make. A novel philosophizing about the pain of love. And Zeller has such glittering narrative moments that capture the universal:

"Sadness doesn't recognize the traditional frontiers of matter; it takes possession of everything around it and spreads by means of the nostalgic method of contamination; we don't just feel sad in part of ourselves, we're swept away by sadness the way a flood sweeps away daffodil shoots; the liquid invades your whole body and stays put. It's called drowning."

I like this book for it's precociousness and for Zeller's imperfections. I felt the same about the narrator - imperfect, precocious and a man who admits he's is in pain.

[Joe Loftus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Expect probable spelling errors: I am sitting on the train with sweat dripping down my forehead. I have just been to the gym for the first time after six months of drinking a lot of beer and eating far too much crap. I'm in the worst physical state of my life but already I'm debating what beer to drink when I get to the pub later and what to order from the Indian. Fuck it. I loved this book. Zeller's writing reminds me a lot of my own thought processes and at just 22 when Artificial Snow was first published it makes one helluva first novel. I loved it and I guess that's all there is to say. The only reason I haven't given this book five stars, and there are some worse books that I have given five stars too, is that at times, and very rare times, I can sense Zeller's youth and slight, very slight, naivety. For instance (SPOILER) all the ramblings about cutting Lou up... it seemed to jump from Camus / Celine / Proust all the way up to 11 and thus Easton Ellis. Nothing wrong with this however just a personal dislike. Ultimately a great, great book and one that was an utter pleasure to read. I will be reading Zellers entire works in the very near future and as he is just 37 at the minute I hope he has lots more to come.

[Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the pitfalls of reading literature in translation is that some authors see their work, if they see it all, come to the English language in a chronology all of their own. Artificial Snow (2002) was Florian Zeller’s debut novel, but it’s the last of his four to be translated and published. Reading his book, therefore, has almost been an exercise in regression. Having started with the mature and satisfying, The Fascination Of Evil, we now find ourselves back when the author, in his early twenties, was learning his trade and was style trying veer off from Kundera to a style all his own.

Read my full review here.

[Myriam · Rating 4 out of 5]

J'ai trouvé ce roman très bien ecrit, les phrases sont bien ponctuées.

J'ai préféré "les amants du n'importe quoi", cependant il y a une telle fluidité dans la lecture des mots que ce livre reste un bon souvenir!

[Adeline PERAUDEAU · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lire quand on a pas le moral pendant les fêtes, désarmant, bien construit, la couverture parle d'elle même.

[SuperNinja32 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vide.
C'est ce que j'ai pensé tout le long de ma lecture mais j'ai quand même continué sans trop savoir pourquoi, j'aime bien le style d'écriture et puis je me demandais naïvement si un soudain quelque chose allait arriver. Vide.

[Vivian Zenari · Rating 2 out of 5]

A young man novel, that is, young man takes himself seriously, falls in love with one who rejects him eventually, sees women as sexual objects only, and philosophizes poorly about it all. Some self-referentiality gives it some humour.

[Jean-Pascal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jeune, parisien et content de soi. Un monument de complaisance et de vacuité. Heureusement ce n'est pas mal écrit et c'est court.

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

A boring narrator does unbelievable things and makes tedious observations, all in pretentious and shallow prose. Utter shit. Wretched.

[Yuna · Rating 2 out of 5]

trop déçue parce que le début est trop beau mais narrateur insup, culture du viol et du sexisme à son paroxysme : vomi

[Tara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started out being enthralled by this book, the narrators stark portrayal of the meaninglessness of life. However I found the book empty, and I wanted him to spend more time embellishing on those sections of negative thoughts. Sadly I think this book was too short and too all over the place for someone to really enjoy.

[Ivan Ivanov · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ce roman m'a convaincu que je ne devrais jamais acheter le bouquin d'un auteur seulement parce que je trouve sa femme (Marine Delterme) incroyablement belle et très talentueuse comme sculptrice. Un roman complètement vide, stérile, répétitif et ennuyeux. J'ai lu jusqu’à la page 80 et je ne pouvais plus, ce qui ne m'arrive pas souvent. Aucun intérêt pour moi.

[Am · Rating 2 out of 5]

Post-breakup misogyny and nihilism. Philosophically ambitious, somewhat autobiographical? about a violently forlorn, jilted lover.

[ClaudiaBiEnne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Trama delirante e senza interesse, scrittura imbarazzante, citazioni fuori luogo.
Un libro inutile.