The Enigma of Room 622

by Joël Dicker

“People always think that writing a novel begins with an idea. But a novel begins most of all with a desire: the desire to write. A desire that grabs you and that nothing can stop, a desire so strong that you turn your back on everything else. That perpetual desire to write, I call the writer’s sickness. You can have the best plot for a novel, but if you have no desire to write, you’ll get nowhere.”

“Because you’re assembling facts, as I just described. But a plot needs questions. Start by presenting your scenario as a series of questions: why does a young bride kill her husband on their wedding night? Who is this young woman? Who is her husband? What is the background of their marriage? Why did they get married? Where did they get married?”

“Any kind of fact?” she repeated, somewhat incredulously, as if she were challenging me. “Any kind of fact. Let’s take a very concrete example. Unless I’m mistaken, you’re in room 621A, right?” “Absolutely.” “And me, I’m in room 623. And the room before yours is 621. I walked the entire floor to make sure: there is no room 622. That’s a fact. Why, in the Hôtel de Verbier, is there a room 621A instead of room 622? That, that’s a plot line. And the start of a novel.” She smiled. She was beginning to enjoy the game. “Yes, but there could be a rational explanation. Some hotels skip room 13 out of concern for superstitious guests.” “If there’s an immediate rational explanation, the plot fails and there is no novel. That’s when the novelist goes into action. For a novel to exist, the writer has to push

back on the walls of rationality, undo reality, and – especially – create a story where there was none before.” “And how would you do that for this hotel room?” asked Scarlett, who seemed not to have completely understood what I was saying. “In the novel, the writer, in looking for an explanation, will question the concierge of the hotel.”

“So, room 621A is simply a construction mistake.” “Not for the novelist,” I reminded her, “otherwise the story ends there. In the novel, the concierge is lying. Buy why? What’s the truth about this mysterious room 621A? What happened there that made the hotel staff decide to conceal it? That’s one way to construct a story from a simple situation.” “And now?” she asked. “And now,” I joked, “it’s up to you to move forward. I’m going to bed.” Little did I suspect that I had just ruined my holiday.

“The man who can make you laugh can also make you live, for there is no finer feeling,” Sol had said to her one morning. “Why’s that?” she enquired, amused. “Because laughter is the strongest feeling of all, stronger than love and passion. Laughter is a form of perfection. We never regret it; we always experience it fully. When it’s over, we’re always satisfied – we want it to go on, but we do not ask for more. Even the memory of laughter is pleasant.”

“Well, well,” Macaire said. “Sometimes we can be really dumb.” “No,” Lev said. “When we really want to believe in something, we see what we want to see.” Macaire agreed.

Where do the dead go? Wherever they can be remembered. Especially in the stars. For they continue to follow us, they dance and

shine in the night, just above our heads.

Life is a novel whose conclusion we already know: in the end, the hero dies. The most important thing is not how our story ends, but how we fill the pages. For life,

like a novel, must be an adventure. And adventures are life’s holidays.