Review: The Enigma of Room 622

1/5 stars

The Enigma of Room 622, by Joël Dicker (2020)

Translated by Robert Bononno

If I were the translator I'd take a biiiiiiig step back to distance myself from this one. This novel is bad. I don't know what it's like in the original French - like, maybe the dialogue is less cliché? - but I'll tell you what. In English? It's awful. I've never before used anything more than 1x speed when listening to an audiobook, but near the end I upped this one to 2x just so I could get through it.

I thought this would be fun. I thought it so much that I just. kept. trying. to find the positives. This was touted to be a clever murder-mystery/spy novel set in Geneva, Switzerland - mostly at a luxury hotel, and at a leading, respected bank - with scenes scattered amongst other glamorous European cities.

What it is instead: Frigid, boring love triangles, tedious dialogue, even more tedious characters (that are either deathly boring or just exceedingly unlikable), too many nonsensical twists, and a plot line that jumps back and forth in time so often that it's impossible to keep track of what's going on.

It starts many years ago, with an unsolved murder in room 622 of the Hotel Verbier. In present-day, a writer has a messy break-up and decides he needs to get out of town. He travels to the Hotel Verbier, where he meets a woman who convinces him to investigate this murder. The writer, who is named (surprise!) Joel Dicker, and the woman embark on an adventure where they interview people and uncover the truth.

The flashbacks tell the story of two bankers, one of whom is a lazy bum, but his family owns the bank, so he wants to be president because he feels he's entitled to it. They both love the same woman. She loves one of them, but is married to the other. There's a very big to-do about who is going to become president, how they're going to become president, who's going to vote this way or that, who maybe murdered someone else (we don't even know who died for most of the novel) to get what they wanted, etc. And it does not matter, and I did not care. Also, all the men make the same idiotic mistakes over and over, and the women are either beautiful but rather stupid, or conniving gold-diggers.

I think Dicker was trying to be clever, with all the twists and the time jumps, building what he thought was a web of intrigue. In actuality, it was more like when a dog-walker with 5 dogs and another dog-walker with 5 dogs meet at the corner and all the leashes get tangled, and the dog-walkers trip over the leashes, and no one knows which leash goes to which dog or even which dogs go to which dog-walker. That is to say - a hot mess. Watching the dog-walker scenario would have been much more entertaining.

In conclusion: Boring characters. Lackluster romance. Overly complicated plot points. Ridiculous ending. Pretentious writing.

Here are the two main spoilers, if you don't plan to read this book (you shouldn't):

1. Half the characters aren't real - they're just one of the bankers wearing masks. Somehow we're meant to believe these masks are so unbelievably good that they have fooled people, even at very close proximity, into thinking these characters exist for at least 15 years. The masks are some kind of cutting edge technology that somehow a failed actor who lives at a hotel, and his son who became a banker have access to. There's reveal after reveal of, "oh, btw, this character is actually just this guy in a mask," and "oh that other guy too," and "this guy as well!" Sacré bleu!

2. "The writer" has written this book, and it's all fiction. Or something. Cool cool cool. From another GoodReads review: "There's no bigger kiss-off from a writer than having it rubbed in your face that everything you've read has been completely contrived." Also, "the writer" and the actual author or one and the same, and "the writer" talks ad nauseum about his love for his former publisher, who has the same name as Dicker's former publisher.

Never again, Joël Dicker!

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