Turin, 11 May 2024 – Everything revolves around one question: why don’t we listen to ourselves anymore? the new thriller by Joël Dicker, ‘A wild animal’ (The ship of Theseus). “We live in a world where we are obsessed with others and ourselves. We are on Instagram, Facebook and we expect others to give us the okay to what we do. We use filters and appear different from how we really are.” Dicker says welcomed like a star at the Turin Book Fair, with very long queues to enter the Auditorium more than half an hour before one of the most awaited events of the event began. Great applause welcomed the super-bestselling Swiss writer on stage, immediately at the top of the ranking of best-selling books in Italy with the new thriller which started with one of the best performances ever.
“Thank you thank you. Italy feels like my home, my family. My grandmother was from Trieste. Thank you for this fantastic hospitality” smiles Dicker in conversation with Linus. “I don’t know yet what the next step will be, but the most important thing for me, now that this book comes out in Italy, the country of my grandmother and my heart, it’s realizing how close the readers are to me. They follow me with affection, encourage me, trust me and accompany me on my journey” she states. “To what extent are our behaviors defined by the expectations of others and not by our own?” These are the questions from which Dicker started in ‘A Wild Animal’ in which he leaves the American setting of Maine for a more familiar and contemporary context, his native Geneva, with two pairs of protagonists involved against their will in a robbery and trapped in a diabolical intrigue, from which no one emerges unscathed.
“My novels set in Maine they are timeless. Those that take place in Geneva they have a contemporary setting because I live there” explains the author of the world publishing phenomenon of the trilogy Harry Quebert, concluded with ‘The Alaska Sanders case’. ‘A Wild Animal’, his seventh novel, marks a new turning point in his career. “You have to write a little at random like when you’re walking along a path, without knowing where you’re going. Every time there’s a twist, readers say ‘it’s not possible’,” she says, speaking about his creative process. “Writing is like a marathon. You have to follow the program. At a certain point you feel the difficulties, the fatigue but this is also the beauty of it. When you run you don’t run to win, to compete. Writing is not something against someone, you do it for yourself” she underlines while the audience listens to her spellbound. “I always write at dawn, at three in the morning. Years ago I would have said that I have an office where I go to write in complete tranquility. Now it’s different, I have many collaborators, children. I write where I can hide.”
To remain in tradition, this thriller also approaches 500 pages. “I don’t think about readers when I write, rather I am in relationship with myself, I start from an observation. I don’t want to please readers, but to have a sharing with them”. Which character is most similar to her? “In her gaze towards the world , not for the plot of the books, Harry. However, the view on the world changes with the stages of life. In ‘A Wild Animal’ it is no coincidence that they are all in their forties, I identify with their age”, while “responsibility – he says – is the common thread of all my books”.
Before Harry Quebert, Dicker had written many novels but “The publishers told me no. When I started writing that book I told myself that I would stop, it was the last time. Then I was successful and made a trilogy, but I already had the idea. Elisabetta Sgarbi had purchased the rights to Quebert before my success, on trust. I am very grateful to her and I have a strong connection with Italy. Obviously the first country that appreciated me was France because I write in French.” What would Quebert have done if it hadn’t worked? “I would always write because writing is a need for me”, replies the Genevan writer who doesn’t like “mystery novels with too much technology. I like there to be a challenge in my books, I provide the reader with all the tools to solve the case. All this comes from the desire to write stories that I as a reader would understand” he says. Dicker doesn’t even like environments that are too violent and if there is a dead person “I don’t like describing the scene in too many details”. As for the twists, like the rest, “they cannot be thought of in advance”.
