Two years ago, Joël Dicker, a Swiss man in his mid-twenties, wrote a novel about a man in his mid-twenties who writes a novel. The book in the book becomes a bestseller, and the protagonist, Marcus Goldman, spends the next 700 pages trying to hide from, and live up to, his new-found fame, reports The Daily Telegraph.
What Dicker turned out to be writing was not just a book but his own future. A few weeks after The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair was published in France, it became the most talked-about French novel of the decade. It has now sold more than two million copies, is about to be translated into 32 languages and will be published in both Britain and the United States in May. Very few foreign-language novels make big waves in anglophone countries, but this one seems genuinely likely to buck the trend – and to judge by what went on behind the scenes, publishing insiders have known that for some time.
Dicker is now 28 years old, and a little unsure, still, what’s hit him. “It’s completely backwards!” he says of the self-fulfilling prophecy. We are sitting in a hotel bar in London, one of countless foreign cities to which Dicker has been whisked off by publicists. He is a sweet, gentlemanly sort – a lawyer by training – whose hype has reached a pitch of near-comedy. In Britain, his book is being sent out with a press release advertising Dicker as “Switzerland’s coolest export since Roger Federer”.
“It makes me realise that what I wrote was wrong,” he reflects, “because success isn’t like that when you’re living it. In my book, the guy’s novel becomes a bestseller and he takes off on holiday. I haven’t had a holiday for two years because I’ve been promoting this book!” He laughs. “Though some small details have happened to me too: the posters in the Metro, the display devoted to him in his old school…”
Dicker admits that he has become so recognisable in his native Geneva that he can’t have conversations on his mobile phone in public places, and his girlfriend – a sports psychologist for the Geneva hockey team – has taken a while to get used to it. Since September 2012, when the book was first published in French, his life has been, in his own description, “a crazy whirlwind”.
Read more of this report from The Daily Telegraph.