User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Dicker’s latest novel (end of May 2020) is probably one of the most highly anticipated books in the French publishing arena for the foreseeable future and is poised to be this summer’s hit if we can believe the hype surrounding the release. But I found a somewhat rehashed recipe that, although Dicker introduces an interesting narrative vehicle at the beginning of this story, narrowly fails to provide that which long-time fans have been hankering for : innovation. Read on for more, there are no spoilers.
You’ve read this book before. Maybe not literally, but if you’ve read any Dicker since ‘Harry Quebert’ before and saw a couple of tired Hollywood blockbuster sequels with disappointing endings, then yes, you’ve read this before.
Before starting, I want to clarify that I have been a big fan of Dicker since the very start. The real start, meaning since his first book : ‘The Last Days of Our Fathers.’ I loved his storytelling in the first one, and was even more enchanted by his talented narrative structuring of a story in his second and third :’The Truth about Harry Quebert’ and then ‘Baltimore Boys’. That fast page-turner style, short and captivating chapters, characters inspired by an old America that made us hunker for the past and above all : his keen talent for developing a story simultaneously from the past and the present. All the elements of a book you don’t forget quickly. This wasn’t that.
My first ‘disappointment’ (although disenchantment might be more appropriate) was his last book, ‘The disappearing of Stephanie Mailer’ which I found to be a near-incomprehensible, overstuffed, superfluously expansive attempt at recreating the atmosphere he had brought us in ‘The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair’. I sympathise with authors who reach tremendous success at a young age, as Dicker did with his first and second books. I imagine the crushing weight of having to ‘redo the trick now’ has devastating effects not only on an author’s motivation, but also on his or her creativity. So what do you do in times of moral and creative hazard? You rehash what worked before. That’s what Dicker did with Mailer and in some extend (thankfully a bit less still) with this latest one. What was true for Mailer remains true for 622 : the story is tailored to fit a more international audience (because movie and TV rights to sell), the narrative structure is the same, the characters are disappointingly superficial clichés despite being described at large over the course of nearly 600 pages, the story (and it’s inhabitants) have more twists and bumps than a Belgian highway. You see when you write a near-600 page novel, you need to keep your reader going. So you need a lot of twists and bumps, and to achieve this he splits the branches of his character’s lives so much that the tips reach the stratosphere. But in stratosphere, the air is thin, and so are a lot of these characters and their backstories. With “Stephanie Mailer” Dicker thought that to achieve the same success, or even more so than with Quebert, all he needed to do was to take the same recipe and add more ingredients. The problem is that it became an indigestible, convoluted piece in which he had tried to outsmart even himself.
This one suffers from the same fate to a large extent, but is somewhat saved by a novelty introduced at the very beginning. We’re not following some random made up character, but we’re following Dicker himself. Joel, living in Geneva (a word you’ll read about a million times more) is in between writing books and stuck. He’s sad his mentor has passed away and fears never to be able to write again. It’s an interesting vehicle that could lead to an amazing book. Sadly though, Dicker writes himself away too quickly in lieu of the main story. In lieu of “Stephanie Mailer II after a session of Control+F & Control+V.” I wanted to know more about his story. About his coming of age story. Not the unconvincingly far-fetched story he dropped as an avalanche on top of his own storyline. The principal plot revolves around the solving of a murder that occurred in one of the fanciest Swiss hotels, and you’ve guessed it – it’s in room 622 – , decades ago. As per usual, multiple simultaneously interweaving characters and plot lines are quickly let loose on your imagination, all of which converge at a snail’s pace to a single end near the end of the book. The characters seem to be pulled out in vivendi from movie scripts that barely made it onto Netflix. The underlying story – the banking world in Switzerland – is admittedly a fresh framework and carries huge potential because the lenient banking laws that have governed that world for decades will never cease to fascinate, yet they remain largely unused. It’s all about the hotel(s).
What I was most disappointed with was the ‘Deus Ex Machina’ Dicker pulled out of his hat near the end of the story to make it all come together. Kind of come together. I actually had to reread the revealing passage, fearing I had missed out on something crucially and that would result in the Deus Ex Machine only being a misunderstanding no my part. But after rereading it, I could only come to the inescapable conclusion that it was in fact real. It was as definitive as black ink on paper can ever be. Don’t misunderstand me : he needed to pull out a rabbit from his hat because as usual he had tried to outsmart everyone including himself and had thus written himself into a corner. But for the trick to work the rabbit needs to be alive when it reappears. And it needs to be a rabbit.
The most enjoying part of this novel – and mainly the reason why I will rate this slightly better as his last one – were the passages where he reminisces about Bernard de Fallois, his old mentor, and how he played a pivotal role in getting his career started. Early on, we learn that Dicker wanted this book to be a tribute to Bernard, but in my eyes if he had wanted to write a tribute about his old mentor, he should’ve written a tribute to his old mentor. Not an underused vehicle to carry his otherwise rehashed story along. Not a book waiting to be turned into a movie or worse – a ten part miniseries – under the thinly veiled pretence that it’s an ode to his mentor. And I really do feel while reading those few passages that he really intended it to be a tribute worthy of the Egyptian pyramids, but could then not escape the clutches of his old ways and relapsed into the already known success recipe. I really wanted to read that book, the tribute, because through those pages where he recounts old meetings and colourful encounters with Bernard I was able to see a glimpse of the young, talented and most of all : hungry new writer we had all come to love through the course of his first books.
Make no mistake, this book will sell well and is entertaining to read on the beach without thinking too much about it. But it’s also a book that’ll end up at the bottom of the beach bag at the end of summer without having been finished and the reader will be no worse off. And Dicker can do better. I know that, you know that, and I feel he knows that. But it would mean abandoning the recipe he has now used so much and which brought him this level of success to risk something he might fail at.
There’s a saying between successful thriller authors : “Write or Vanish”. When the content is subordinate to the volume, you need to pump out a lot of work to be remembered. That’s how you end up with Patterson’s and Steel’s, and XXX who pump out more books than there are seasons in a year. I would urge Dicker to go against that idea. To go upstream. To write less, but deeper. Because I want to feel that same excitement I felt when reading him years ago. And somewhere I’m sure, he wants it too.
Rating: really liked it
EXCERPT: Prologue - the day of the murder - Sunday December 16
Six-thirty in the morning. The Hôtel de Verbier was dark. Outside, it was pitch dark and snowing heavily.
On the sixth floor, the doors of the service elevator opened. A hotel employee appeared with a breakfast tray and made his way to Room 622.
When he reached the room, he noticed that the door was ajar. Light spilled through the opening. He knocked but there was no response. Finally, he decided to go in, assuming that the door had been left open for that purpose. He walked in and let out a scream. Running from the room, he went to alert his colleagues and call for help.
As the news spread through the hotel, the lights went on, floor by floor.
On the carpet of Room 622 lay a corpse.
ABOUT 'THE ENIGMA OF ROOM 622': One night in December, a corpse is found in Room 622 of the Hotel Verbier, a luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps. A police investigation begins without definite end, and public interest wanes with the passage of time. Years later, the writer Joel Dicker, Switzerland's most famous literary ingenue, arrives at that same hotel to recover from a bad breakup, mourn the death of his longtime publisher, and begin his next novel. Little does Joel know that his expertise in the art of the thriller will come in handy when he finds himself investigating the crime. He'll need a Watson, of course: in this case, that would be Scarlett, the beautiful guest and aspiring novelist from the next room, who joins in the search while he tries to solve another puzzle: the plot of his next book. Meanwhile, in the wake of his father's passing, Macaire Ebezner is set to take over as president of the largest private bank in Switzerland. The succession captivates the news media, and the future looks bright, until it doesn't. The bank's board, including a certain Lev Levovitch-Geneva's very own Jay Gatsby-have other plans, and Macaire's race to the top soon becomes a race against time...
MY THOUGHTS: I was looking forward to a 'book within a book' mystery, which is not what I got. Think 'corporate conspiracy' instead.
I spent a great deal of my listening time confused. There are constantly changing non-linear timelines and points of view.
I was, initially, far more interested in the Joël Dicker/Scarlett storyline, but this accounts for few of the 600 plus pages and, really, not much happens.
The characters border on the ridiculous and act like idiots.
So, The Enigma of Room 622 was, for me, an incredibly convoluted corporate conspiracy that confused the heck out of me involving people who have equally convoluted personal lives, and the point of which I never got. 🤷♀️
The final lines of The Enigma of Room 622 are, “for life, like a novel, must be an adventure. And adventures are life’s vacations.” This was no adventure. Think The Beatles 'A Hard Day's Night', but without the 'feel all right' factor. This was a very long 596 pages.
⭐⭐
#TheEnigmaofRoom622 #NetGalley
I: @joeldicker @quercusbooks
T: @JoelDicker @QuercusBooks
#contemporaryfiction #crime #murdermystery #mystery
THE AUTHOR: Joël Dicker was born in 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland, where he studied law. He spent childhood summers in New England, particularly in Stonington and Bar Harbor, Maine.
DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Quercus Audio, MacLehose Press via Netgalley for providing an audio ARC of The Enigma of Room 622 written by Joël Dicker and narrated by Chris Harper for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.
For an explanation of my rating system please refer to my Goodreads.com profile page or the about page on sandysbookaday.wordpress.com
This review and others are also published on Twitter, Amazon and my webpage https://sandysbookaday.wordpress.com/...
Rating: really liked it
I am a reader, and I read all the books Joel Dicker wrote. I can say without any doubt that this is one of the worst books I have ever read. Joel Dicker disappoints again. I liked the story, its intriguing, and since the first page the reader is hooked. Some of the developments and twists are clever. However the style and language is not believable, and I am still debating if its the Italian translator or if its Dicker, though I am tempted to think its a bit of both.
The dialogue are surreal and not believable at all. Who talks like that? It seems he added dialogue just to fill the page and add to a story that could have been at least one hundred pages shorter. How many times are we supposed to hear that colleagues greeted Macaire as Mr. President? and he was both upset and flattered? But its really the way the characters talk to each other, its soap opera dialogue not language that belongs in a book.
And then the translation, the use of terms that we dont use anymore in the Italian language. There is also a whining tone, that I observe in other books, especially the previous one, The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer.
Throughout the book I kept on wondering where was the author of The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair, because it cannot be the same person who wrote this book. All characters seem caricatures and stereotypes rather than real people. Not for a minute you believe they could be real people.
I am just so disappointed, I didnt give up, but it was a struggle.. a real struggle. There are a couple of other authors who have changed so much in their style and voice from the first book to their last, and again I dont know if someone else wrote the book or if he cannot find the same inspiration, but comparing the first and this last one, I am just so doubtful.
Rating: really liked it
I bought this book because I thought it was a noir, or a thriller, or a spy story, because of the title. Instead, I discovered that this book is a great mockery of the author towards the reader. But in a good way. A great hoax, which will be revealed only in the last two pages. Last two pages of 632 pages, in which really everything happens, where the twists and turns follow one after the other and where nobody (but really nobody) is what it seems. The author is very good at intertwining the many stories of the many characters and, since he had 632 pages available, he was able to outline well the contours of all, both from a physical and psychological point of view, so much so that it seems to have them in front of your eyes. It is a book to which, in the end, it is difficult to put a label: of course, there is a crime involved, and a whole very intricate story to get to the culprit, so it is a noir; but there is also a whole series of events that give the author the opportunity to talk to us about love, ambition, fiction, regrets, appearances, to the point of saying that all this is the Life, "a novel of which the end is known: the protagonist dies. But the most important thing is not how it ends, but how we fill the pages ”. Nice, I liked it, and I think one day I'll read it again. Four stars.
Rating: really liked it
2.5 rounded down
I’ve just been on the choo-choo train to the land of disappointment especially as I really really enjoyed The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair, The Baltimore Boys though it has to be said less so The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer.
It’s 6:30 am on Sunday, the 16th of December and at the Hotel de Verbier in the Swiss Alps an employee delivers breakfast to room 622 and discovers a dead body. Subsequent enquiries lead to no arrests.
A few days prior to the murder Macaire Ebezner is in Madrid and anxious to get home to Geneva where the expectation is that he will be named president of Ebezner bank except he isn’t, as Lev Levovitch is, who is having an affair with Macaire’s Anastasia.
In June 2018 writer Joel heads to the hotel to recover from the ending of a love affair and along with fellow guest Scarlet Leonas they set out to investigate the Enigma of room 622.
Convoluted much? If we add in long winded (600 pages or so) and constantly dizzyingly zipping about in nonlinear timelines the result is a lot of eye rolling from me! The plot takes us to Switzerland and points west and south via a circuitous route at a snails pace which ultimately means you cease to care very much about enigmas. Let’s chuck in on/off love affairs which go on so long it begins to feel like a worn out record, some stereotypical bankers who definitely act like a word that rhymes with banker, some incredibly cheesy dialogue and much repetition of said dialogue that I nearly pass out from boredom. Some comments make me cringe they’re so bad.
I don’t know if it’s meant to be a take on a French farce but that’s what it feels like with similar (not) humour.
However, I think some of the issues are due to a poor translation which you can’t blame the author for. There are some fairly good twists towards the end although you have to wait a long time for them but at least they are unpredictable. Unfortunately they’re not sufficiently dynamic for me to raise the rating .
Where is the author that gave us Harry Quebert because the bottom line is he’s missing here?!
With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Maclehose Press, Quercus for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.
Rating: really liked it
I sighted more reading this book than I did reading the incomprehensible assembly instructions of my Ikea BRIMNES bed. ...which says it all about it.
Look, I still remember starting to read
The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, by Joël Dicker on an early Saturday morning. I proceeded to not get up, not eat, not shower until I finished that story. I HAD TO KNOW what happened. It was compelling and the narration was brilliant enough to make you forget some clichés here and there.
Then, I read
The Final Days of our Fathers, and the Baltimore Boys, and the Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer...and with each book, I wondered: “
Is this author actually overrated?”.He is.Yes, his narration mode is attractive (as much as he is. Google Images him. You will thank me later).
BUT, the clichés: the men characters who always have to be scared of commitment or unable to make the right decision (hello narrator, hello Lev), the women characters who are always desperate to be loved or love (hello Anastasia), the lines that sometimes seem to come from a Hallmark movie.
With Joel Dicker, I am usually ready to forgive those clichés, because the plot and the way he unveils the mystery of his books are usually crowd-pleasing enough (and I am part of a crowd easy to please).
But on this one...
the mystery was there at the beginning, the answers absolutely easy and disappointing at the end. I felt uncomfortable with the way he describes and makes the character of Arma act (hello racial overtones). I was reading faster and faster, in the hope, something will save the book in the end. It never happened. The last 200 pages were even tough to read for me.
The only thing enjoyable was reading about Bernard de Fallois. I just wished I didn’t have to read it an egocentric story, with a far-fetched ending that gave me
the same bitter taste as the Lost tv show ending.-
Worst part: it was the most disappointing book to start my 2021 year.
-
Best part: my readings can only get better after that one.
Rating: really liked it
1.5 starsA pompous effort hindered further by a soulless translation, it is rare to encounter a novel where everything is working against itself, and I genuinely don't know who could find enjoyment out of Joël Dicker's
The Enigma of Room 622 (the US edition).
I'm still at a loss on the novel's tone, and this is mainly due to the mismatched translation by Robert Bononno; there's a constant disconnect between the basic, rudimentary phrasing, and the larger-than-life comedic scenarios; every jokey exchange is delivered flat, and emotion never resonates because I can't determine whether the original intent is going for bombastic melodrama, or subtle authenticity. As a result, I'm not at all engaged in its tangled web of deceit, infidelity, and corporate power struggle, which while admirably complex, feels cartoonish and definitely overstays its welcome at nearing 600 pages.
The novel also goes meta-fiction with a parallel narrative featuring Joël Dicker (the author himself) researches the titular (fictional) mystery, experiences writer's block, and reminisces about his (real life) mentor/editor Bernard de Fallois. This semi-autobiographical material could be too foreign for the US audience to fully 'get' and appreciate, as neither the author nor the editor has the same name recognition here comparing to their home country. It doesn't stop there,
The Enigma of Room 622 goes even further with a 'meta-squared' maneuver near the end; while I enjoy it for how obnoxious it is, it has absolutely no relevance or stylistic correlation to the plot before it.
The Enigma of Room 622 might be the most bloated, messy novel I've read this year. In large part I truly believe is due to the horrendous translation, which misses out on all the nuances of the French language and European attitude. I'll be curious to seek out reviews of this novel in its original form, because reading the US edition alone, this is beyond a slight career misfire from an established, award-winning author, this is embarrassingly bad.
**This ARC was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Much appreciated!**
Rating: really liked it
4,5
This book is really amazing! One of the best mysteries I've read in a long time.
Don't expect a twist at the end. You will get twists at the beginning, twists in the middle, and more twists at the end. It was really entertaining. I was considering giving it 5 stars but there were one or two absurd situations/reactions of characters. I think they happened because obviously Dicker is a romantic. Sigh... But, the book itself is great because it carries you back and forth in time, Dicker really connects very well what happens in the present with what you discover in the flashbacks. A great piece of work!
This is my first Dicker. So far I didn't have the chance to read the Harry Quebert book. I've been told Quebert is better than this one. Let's see... I may start it soon.
Rating: really liked it
This book is so bad - I think it's one of the worst book that I managed to finish. At some point it was so bad and so unbelievable I thought it was Dickers try of a new genre: comedy or Vaudeville. The characters are so ridiculous they seem taken out of a Moliere comedy. One of the main character (husband) is so ridiculous it sounds it was just created to make fun of.
Just because I wanted to get to the end which if course was total non-sense.
All the characters are grotesque and not believable. Also there are no characters you can relate to. The love stories are phony. The plot is so bad. Attempts from the writer to mislead us are patheticd as some plot twist are clear from the beginning.
The prose is horrible as well and the level of a high school student. The writer has such a nice opinion if himself it's comical.
Avoid at all cost and save the week I lost reading this atrocity.
Rating: really liked it
The enigma of Room 622 is about a writer who goes to a hotel in order to spend two weeks relaxing but ends up writing a new book about an investigation. A few years ago, in that same hotel, someone died in room 622 and the police never found the murderer.
I was expecting to love this, since The truth about the Harry Quebert Affair is one of my favorite books. However, this one was very different. I felt like it wasn't by the same author. The writing style was not even close to being as good as his older book. (??) It didn't feel like a novel, it felt like a script. The language was too simplistic, unnatural with no depth. The dialogues almost felt childish and cringey, like they were a way for the author to reveal a certain things in a very obvious and easy way.
I also didn't see the point of the author constantly speaking and referring to his editor as a tribute. I mean it's nice but it doesn't have any connection to the story. (??)
I was very often bored, over it and even thought of dnf'ing it. There are many characters and a lot of information that I found useless and confusing. It really could have been a shorter book!
Also the themes of this book weren't very interesting to me and maybe I wasn't the right audience. It deals a lot with business and bank affairs, which is something I don't really care that much to be reading about. Or maybe it just wasn't presented in an interesting way. (??) I really think this could be adapted into a good movie. I would probably watch and like it. However, as a book, it just wasn't that fascinating.
The last few chapters were way more interesting and there were a few surprising twists I didn't see coming but I wish it hadn't dragged for so long.
I would probably rate it a 3/5.
Rating: really liked it
Incredibly tedious, dull and comic book like characters, improbable and convoluted plot, this author has so much to learn about how to tell a good story.
Rating: really liked it
This is a very long twisty turny kind of crime novel with a slightly bouncy feel, at times it feels much more like a screwball comedy or a low stakes romance. It is distinctly old fashioned. Despite being set in this century, there is almost never a cell phone or a computer. If at first you think this is set in the real world, I assure you it is not. It is quite fussy and often silly and if you do not find its constant need to lay out every single piece of backstory, then you may find it amusing.
It is very long, much longer than it needs to be. You could easily edit this book to half the size. You could also basically remove the outer trappings where the novelist makes himself a character who is writing a novel. The framing device adds basically nothing to the story, and you will often forget about it entirely. I have never seen so many flashbacks in my life. This book will never explain something in a paragraph when it could give you a whole subplot of flashbacks.
It does have its charms, once you get what it's going for it can be a very nice, breezy change of pace from the dreary bleakness in so much crime fiction.
But be warned: this is a book nearly 600 pages long where you don't even know who died until about halfway through. Impossible to do this one without a heaping helping of patience.
Rating: really liked it
A twisty mystery featuring the author himself.
This is a slow burn, with an eye firmly on character, it kind if drifts along offering new perspectives with each passing chapter as you move between past and present
The writing is gorgeous and the translation is smooth. The story is intriguing and cleverly presented. My only slight bugbear was it is too long. I enjoy a tome when you don't feel like you are reading one but Enigma could have done with less white noise.
Overall though a very good read.
Rating: really liked it
I've heard a lot of praise and read good reviews of this book, but honestly I could not give it more than one star out of five.
The characters are extremely flat and not well developed at all. They represent the most common clichés of poorly written books. People in this book fall into square, expectable boxes: for example, the beautiful Lev, who speaks so many languages, is extremely intelligent, cunning, a great actor, becomes super rich, busts his arse off at work every day and yet still has a great, sculpted body. Not to mention 15 years of living not just a double, but a quadruple life. Realistically impossible and unsustainable.
Then come the women: they can only fall into two categories: beautiful, smart, educated, cultivated and men's object of desire or servile, meek and obedient. In any case, they are barely supporting actors, as this book is clearly phallocentric and a succession of clichés of what men should aspire to have and to be.
The style of the books did not satisfy me either. Every time a small piece of information was discovered, its entire back story was immediately recounted to the reader through flashbacks marked very well in time and place, as if the reader was thought to be dumb enough not to be able to understand the simple expedient of narrative flashbacks. Moreover, many times throughout the book small details where repeated, as if the writer had forgotten he had already said so 50 pages or so before. Small inconsistencies are also present throughout the book, such as, for example, after being told repeatedly that the notebook was the only object kept inside the safe, suddenly also a gun comes out of it.
The story itself only picks up in the last third of the book; before that it only seems to be a poor writer with too many fantasies putting them all together to create an utterly unrealistic universe. I believe the writer tried to put too much into one single book, creating a grotesque un-reality that demands too much from the reader's suspension of disbelief.
Rating: really liked it
Hesitated between one star and five stars, but went with five for the sheer, clichéd audacity of Dicker's writing in this book. Brimming with ridiculous plot points, unabashed self-promotion and self-indulgently long-winded passages, can't lie, I really enjoyed it.
