Joël Dicker: "The reader, in the end, is the one who always decides"

• Interview.Dicker and the Baltimore
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Joël is Joël in the novel. And dismantle the Writer, like this in capital letters. Not only does he build a novel within the novel, but he plays a mistake with himself (and with his characters, of course). Joël Dicker returns with what promises to be another best seller , The Enigma of Room 622 (Alfaguara), an addictive thriller that is also a kind of literary autobiography centered on the late figure of Bernard de Fallois, the legendary Parisian publisher (he was Simenon) that made The Truth About The Harry Québert Case a worldwide success. Dicker talks about himself, does metaliterature with a murder to be solved in the background and, for the first time, moves away from the United States stagehow well they have worked for him to write about his house: Geneva.

Far from the imaginary bucolic of snowy mountains and green meadows, Dicker turns Switzerland into a modern literary mole where bankers, spies, alleged Russian countesses and swindlers cross paths . It all starts with an unsolved murder in a luxury hotel at the foot of the Alps, in the idyllic little town of Verbier. "Switzerland is not as calm as it seems. Geneva is a very cosmopolitan and modern city, headquarters of the United Nations, full of foreigners and transit people. For years it has been the capital of espionage for its great discretion. Switzerland is more than mountains and I think it is necessary to claim it abroad, "he defends. In the heart of Europe, but sometimes so far from Europe, so ... neutral? "Switzerland is like an island in the middle of Europe, yes. It is not a member of the EU but there is a fraternity. It is a bit like the village of Asterix , it has a very particular character ... As it is a federation of micro-states with identities multiple times it is difficult to define. We are Germanic but not entirely, we are French but not completely ... It is like a European micro-union in which there is not the same culture but a unity ".

After writing on the east coast of the United States to the point of appearing to be just another American writer, Dicker sets out on his most personal "literary adventure" with The Riddle in Room 622 . Throughout more than 600 pages, it intertwines a love triangle, a bank plot of successions and intrigues within one of the most important banks in Switzerland and remnants of his own life. "It is not self-fiction, I mix a true story with a fiction , a pure novel. I move between two waters," says the author while sipping his coffee alone in Geneva. Like the Jöel inside the book, he drinks a lot of coffee while writing. "What is the identity of the writer is a question that I became at 27 years? Harry Québert and am still asking me it is something in all my novels.. I explore what it means to be a writer I guess I still go through a years of building myself and that in a while, in the next books, there will be other questions, "he admits. The protagonist of The Québert Case ... , the young writer Marcus Goldman, seemed a clear alter ego of Dicker: "Everyone said to me: it's you !, and I: 'no'", he dramatizes. Now he does make himself a character: "Now he is Joël in Geneva, yes. But is he really me? He wanted to create that uncertainty in the reader, who in the end is the one who always decides," he admits.

While the character Joël dines with a bottle of Burgundy in the fictional Palace of Verbier, he remembers Fallois, his mentor, his teacher, who died at the age of 91. " He was an editor at the former, of which no longer exist. They always let himself be guided by passion and curiosity , excitement literature and desire. There was nothing impossible for him. I was an unknown before the Québert case ... But he believed in the book so much that he personally called all the bookstores in France to tell the booksellers to read it. And then he called again to check that they had done it and see what they thought, "he recalls Dicker. This is his first book without Fallois as editor, although it is present from the first page. Dicker has built a complex literary architecture based on flashbacks , labyrinthine interludes, plot misunderstandings and suspense in the best tradition of Agatha Christie or Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. And, in the end, Joël takes off his mask: he solves an increasingly impossible murder and the Writer confesses.

In accordance with the criteria of The Trust Project

• literature
• culture
• Switzerland

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