Switzerland: The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker
Synopsis: (from amazon)
August 30, 1975. The day of the disappearance. The day Aurora, New Hampshire, lost its innocence.
That summer Harry Quebert fell in love with fifteen-year-old Nola Kellergan. Thirty-three years later, her body is dug up from his yard along with a manuscript copy of his career-defining novel. Quebert is the only suspect. Marcus Goldman-Quebert’s most gifted protégé-throws off his writer’s block to clear his mentor’s name.
Solving the case and penning a new bestseller soon blur together. As his book begins to take on a life of its own, the nation is gripped by the mystery of “The Girl Who Touched the Heart of America”.
But with Nola, in death as in life, nothing is ever as it seems. Joël Dicker’s phenomenal European bestseller is a brilliantly intricate murder mystery, a hymn to the boundless reaches of the imagination, and a love story like no other. Nothing you’ve read or even felt before can prepare you for The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair.
Thoughts: From above, nothing could prepare me? Yeah, I’m pretty sure every cheap thriller from the past thirty years has prepared me for The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair.
This is a book about America by someone I’m not convinced has ever been to America. It seems like a book about America by someone who has watched Die Hard and read a great number of John Irving novels, which would give someone a very skewed view of America. This book was on the shortlist for the Prix Goncourt, which baffles me as it is not a very good book. It isn’t a bad book, but it’s an airport paperback thriller at best, unless a great deal is lost in translation. The excerpts from the “masterpiece” within deserve the quotations I put around masterpiece; the book within a book, the one written by Harry Quebert (there is more than one book within a book in this story), is flat and trivial.
I read this book and I read to the end to see what would happen. It is a good thriller and characters do things that only make sense within the world of thrillers, but I keep seeing this presented as some sort of literary piece of art and for me, it was not that. Good for the beach, good for summer, good for me reevaluating the Prix Goncourt, but otherwise, sort of a tepid sort of book.
(I’m considering this under Switzerland since it was written by a Swiss author, which seems as good a reason as any.)
Rating: 2.5/5
Previous Readings Around the World.