Many of us were waiting for the return of Joel dicker de the Baltimore or even Harry Quebert. Because certainly, the bar was lowered quite a bit in his novel about the disappearance of Stephanie Mailer.
There was that aftertaste of an impossible attempt to overcome, of improvement in the tension on the turns and the spotlights among so many possible murderers. But the most natural flow of the plot was lost, the discovery of the deep motives for the ominousness of the crime. In any other author he would have been forgiven because the novel is very good. But Joel Dicker had us badly accustomed to excellence.
And of course the characters had less force. Because the relationship between the Baltimore "brothers" spun a fascinating spider web made a precious hybrid between the noir genre and a bewildering existentialism. While in the case of Harry Quebert, his relationship with Marcus Goldman turned out to be anthological on several sides, even in terms of the very metaliterary aspect of their interaction.
Once the last page of this new book has expired, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I consider that the case of room 622 extends over the same depths of the Harry Quebert case, surpassing it at times when the novel talks about who writes it, about Joel Dicker immersed in the dilemmas of the narrator camouflaged in the first instance as the first protagonist. . A protagonist who lends the essence of his being to all the other participants.
The appearance of Bernard de Fallois, the publisher who made Joel the literary phenomenon that he is, elevates these metaliterary foundations to a proper entity that is within the novel because that is how it is written. But that ends up escaping the sense of the plot, because it becomes larger than what is properly related despite being a tiny part of its space.
It is the well-known magic of Dicker, capable of presenting several planes that we access by going up and down stairs. From the cellars where the messy motives of the writer are stored to fill pages before the only possible end, death; to the spectacular stage where those strange muffled applause arrive, those of the readers who turn pages with an unpredictable cadence, with the hubbub of words that resonate among thousands of shared imaginary.
We start with a book that is never written, or at least parked, about Bernad, the missing publisher. A love broken by the inescapable power of the words engaged in the plot of a novel. A plot that rambles between the unbridled imagination of an author who presents characters from his world and from his imagination, between trompe l'oeils, anagrams and above all tricks such as that of the novel's essential protagonist: Lev.
Undoubtedly, Lev lives more lives than anyone of the rest of the characters who are related to the crime in room 622. And in the end the crime ends up being the excuse, the trivial, almost accessory at times, a common thread that only becomes relevant when the plot resembles a crime novel. For the rest of the time the world goes by around a hypnotic Lev even when he is not there.
The final composition is much more than a crime novel. Because Dicker always has that fractional pretense of making us see literary mosaics of life. Destructuring to maintain tension but also to be able to make us see the vagaries of our lives, written with those same unintelligible scripts sometimes but with full meaning if the complete mosaic is observed.
Except that at times that almost messianic desire to rule over all life made into a novel and shake it up like an ingenious cocktail is dangerous. Because in a chapter, during a scene, a reader may lose focus ...
It is a matter of putting a but. And it is also a matter of always expecting so much from a great bestseller with such a very personal style. Be that as it may, it cannot be denied that that first person in whom everything is narrated, with the addition of representing the author himself, has won us over from the first moment.
Then there are the famous twists, better achieved than in The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer although below that for me her masterpiece "The Baltimore Book." Without forgetting the juicy embroidery, woven as accessories by a wise and pragmatic Dicker in search of more hooks. I refer to that kind of brilliant and humanistic introspection that links aspects as disparate as destiny, the transience of everything, romantic love in the face of routine, ambitions and the drives that move them from the depths ...
In the end, it must be recognized that, like good old Lev, we are all actors in our own lives. Only none of us come from a family of established actors: the Levovitches, always ready for glory.
You can now buy "The Enigma of Room 622", by Joel Dicker, here:
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