we are assured to be a "novelist, long-distance" , not being able to tell that from afar. A feather transatlantic based in Geneva, looking towards the America, to his childhood memories, on vacation at his cousins on the East coast. In his first three novels, it was discovered and the small town of Aurora. The inevitable Truth about the case of Harry Quebert , in 2012, sold 2 million copies, awarded the Grand Prix du roman of the Académie française and the Goncourt des lycéens, and then adapted into a tv series by Jean-Jacques Annaud, in the following book, (The Book of Baltimore, in 2015), where in Maine we went down to Baltimore, to return to Orphea, in the State of New York (The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer , 2018). A geography of places that are more fantasy than true – "so that the reality does not kill the fiction" provides us with Dicker on the phone – where there were dead bodies floating between two waters, otherwise hidden in the memory of the living under clumps of hydrangeas...

The death was bucolic, the following are now confined. In the chamber 622 of a palace. And our pen liner, Joël Dicker, is stationed in Switzerland. This new novel, The Riddle of the chamber 622, has nothing to do with the Covid-19. Dicker has lived its containment in Swiss, with discipline and punctuality, without that it is "particularly productive" . Because "the bubble needed" to the script (the confinement in his office) does not exist as "if there is one outside of which it is necessary to protect" . In this life at the judgment for all, there is no need of this loophole that is the novel. The novel that was in any way ready before our prison collective. He is, therefore, déconfiné, and if different from the previous ones.

Dual literary and true-false autobiography. Hay of the distance : this time, the novel, written in Switzerland, is going on in this country that has given birth to Dicker, and in the city of Geneva, where he lives. A field archibalisé, but totally reinvented, provides us with the novelist, who inserts himself as a character... The book opens on the ambiguity of a game between double-a literary and true-false autobiography. The narrator is a writer (oh, come on...) who, following the death of its editor, Bernard de Fallois (editor history of Joël Dicker), in January 2018, and a disappointment in love (we don't know more on this point), part shelter in the mountain pastures. While it leads this writer-there in his room on the sixth floor of the palace of Verbier – " the ski resort that boasted always Bernard ", we said the other a novelist, the true, at the end of the line – he observed that his room, number 623, is not preceded by the 622, but the 621 bis. The mystery and intrigue, " unfortunately for his vacation ", continues to Dicker, leads him to learn that a murder has never been solved took place in this room, and the hoteliers, by superstition, changed the number.

The writer, accompanied by Scarlett, a woman encountered on the spot as if by magic, then decides to solve this puzzle. " But when we said it in the book, it said nothing ! " confirms Dicker. Then comes the investigation into the murder, as in a detective novel to the old. In the vein of Arthur Conan Doyle, that the Swiss decision-particularly for its sense of atmosphere, characters and cliché, in the noble sense, recognized, and comfortable ; this in which he plays himself wonderfully well in this terrific novel.

upside. The action, as tense as a speculative bubble, which occurs in the environment is very conducive to the secrecy of a private bank in switzerland, where, for three hundred years, the power is transmitted from father to son. Until the old Abel decides to change the rules. That is, of the only-begotten son, Macarius Ebezner, or abroad, Levovitch, will be elected to its presidency ? And especially at what price ? The clock (swiss) turning it upside down and takes us back through this bag of knots family of wheeling and dealing financial love triangle with the beautiful Anastasia – at the night of the murder, fifteen years earlier...

It is believed, with Macarius, a certain Macquart with long teeth, in Émile Zola ; the figure 622 is a reference to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and it is recognized in this Ebezner, the old Scrooge visited by the ghosts of the past, the present and the future in A Christmas carol, by Charles Dickens. A fable in which Dicker' s "inscri [t] modestly" , says he, referring, again, "the return of Bernard" (de Fallois) and that of the childhood of the characters, "that explains what they are today, and the possibility of change" . A novel about the memories, his memories, that Dicker called "feeling" .§

The Riddle of the chamber 622, of Joël Dicker (Ed. de Fallois, 576 p., 23 €).

Consult our folder : The Point of 12 o'clock

Franck Ferville/Agence VU