Many of today's bestselling writers end up publishing at a miraculous cadence so that every year, or even every few months, their works are back on the shelves of bookstores. Not that I criticize it, but you have to admit a certain marketing instrumentalization of the literature. Some do better, like Joel dicker and in other unspeakable cases it supposes a progressive wear ...
And then we come across bestselling authors like Matthew pearlAfter conquering the reading world, they surprise with a creative lethargy that makes it clear that their thing is not to succumb to editorial rhythms delivered more for sale than for the production of a good product, in many cases at least.
When Matthew wrote Club Dante, he never imagined the impact this mystery novel would have. His publishing house would rub its hands. The idea of ​​writing enigmatic novels in which a universal writer appears as the foundation of the plot sounded like an inexhaustible saga. Then Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky could arrive...
And yes, Matthew decided to continue his saga of mystery novels linked to great writers. After Dante they came Edgar Allan Poe y Charles Dickens, but neither were their publications produced with the frenetic periodicity that the market demands nor did the matter go beyond these two new writers.
Matthew Pearl knows how to keep waiting. And perhaps thanks to him a certain sanity will be recovered above the immediacy, the demands, the haste.
Because in the end a good book, like everything else, is enjoyed and valued much more when it has been known to wait.
Top 3 recommended novels by Matthew Pearl
Poe's shadow
The truth is that Edgar Allan Poe is one of those authors for whom I have a weakness, so this book ended up becoming a kind of alternative biography in which I entered a great mystery about the character and his last days.
The novel starts from the day in 1849 in which Poe is buried with more pain than glory, with that tortuous notion of the moment that put his alcoholism before his creative capacity.
But not everyone is satisfied ... Quentin Clark is determined to restore the glory of the author, reviewing his latest movements to impute his death with the suspicions of something more sinister than the mere effect of the addiction to alcohol.
From the fiction of the novel Quentin delves into the fictions of Poe, looking for his particular inspector Dupin to elucidate the circumstances of Poe's death.
And the truth is that the threads to be pulled appear as dark clues that Poe may well have written and that link to a conspiracy, with characters that seem to have come from Poe's hells and with crude circumstances of Baltimore in those days in the that the world fired Poe.
The Dante club
The lyrics of the Divine Comedy have always given much. The symbols of this great work point to great secrets about life, humanity, the most absolute existence and even astronomy.
This is how Matthew Pearl understood it when he set out to write his first novel, the same one that would soon reach more than 40 countries. The story begins in Boston in the year 1865. The sinister events of those days have the city subject to the rule of terror.
With the scenery of Dante's circles of hell, a murderer leaves samples of his particular work inspired by the Divine Comedy. Only the members of the Dante Club are able to connect the dots and hope to anticipate an enlightened psychopath who is convinced that he must execute what he understands as a prophecy enclosed in literature for which he is its only interpreter.
At the frenetic pace of a police investigation that connects with the enigmas of Dante's work, we also enjoy the nineteenth-century setting in which the esoteric is still conjugated with the lights of reason of modernity.
The last Dickens
The great English author channeled a life subjected to misfortunes in literature. And from that fatal environment that always accompanied this author, Matthew Pearl built a novel that keeps the rhythm alive from the sinister, like his two previous novels about Poe and Dante.
This time all part of the unfinished work of Dickens "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." Under the track of this unfinished novel in installments, we are presented with a story that moves between the two shores of the Atlantic, in an open world that begins to commercialize exhaustively with all types of goods and in which the mafias are already beginning to operate at one's expense. and other side.
Under superb narrative guidance, we went from Boston to London and its Asian colonies, in search of the events that triggered the death of Dickens and its strange derivatives ...
A novel with historical overtones with the romantic point of a Dickens who suffered a thousand misfortunes in his flesh and with the mystery inserted into the plot through certainly disconcerting details.
