Booksellers are in the starting blocks. Readers, on a war footing. The editors, sweating. Two heavyweights in the literary world are preparing to release their new novel, almost simultaneously: Joël Dicker, who has just published A savage animal, printed in 400,000 copies, and Guillaume Musso, who celebrates his twenty-year career with Someone else, at Calmann-Lévy, on March 5, of which 500,000 copies left the presses. Dicker exploded in 2012 with The Truth about the Harry Quebert affair (Editions de Fallois). The novel sold a staggering 819,257 copies in large format and 1,116,989 in paperback, according to figures from GfK. Since then, he has published four other thrillers, approaching a million copies sold for each release, in all formats combined.
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In 2022, he dropped a bombshell in the publishing world by announcing that he was leaving Éditions de Fallois, whose founder, Bernard de Fallois, had died in 2018. The writer did not change publishing houses but founded his own, Rosie & Wolfe, whose almost entire catalog is made up of works by Joël Dicker, who has reissued all his previous successes under his banner. A winning bet: according to GfK, The Alaska Sanders Affair, published in 2023, has sold 530,000 copies in large format. The ambitious Dicker won a victory in self-publishing (even if the term is a little ambiguous, because it is distributed by the Editis group) and confirmed his status as a steamroller on the shelves of bookstores. His novels are exported well: they are translated into fifteen languages.
Sentimental fibers
Guillaume Musso is quiet strength. In twenty years of career and twenty-two published novels, he has sold 34 million books worldwide and has been translated into forty-seven languages. He is, with Michel Houellebecq, the only French author included among the twenty most translated writers in 2019 (according to Literature, an infographic, by Alexandre Gefen and Guillemette Crozet, CNRS Éditions). Guillaume Musso also made a winning bet by changing publisher in 2017, leaving XO Éditions for Calmann-Lévy, house of the Hachette group, very influential in the United States, where Musso wanted to break through. His aura, in fact, has only grown: in 2021, he was the first French writer to receive the prestigious Raymond-Chandler prize, rewarding an author of thriller or noir novel for his entire career, taking the continuation of Michael Connelly, John le Carré, Margaret Atwood or Jo Nesbø…
Everyone has their own recipe. Guillaume Musso’s signature is to never be where you expect him to be. “Guillaume has the ability to take and keep his readers by making them change universes. From book to book, he gives himself the freedom to explore very different worlds, and his audience follows him. marvels Philippe Robinet, general director of Calmann-Lévy editions. Far from the fantastic vein of What will I be without you ? (2009) or romantic The Girl from Brooklyn (2016), Someone else is a pure and hard thriller, in which Musso’s sentimental fiber is expressed.
It features a rich heiress, Oriana Di Pietro, murdered with a poker on board her yacht. A few months earlier, knowing she was doomed by a brain tumor, she had pushed Adèle, a housekeeper in a large hotel, into the arms of her husband, Adrien, a star pianist, in order to ensure a happy future for her two children. But her plan backfired in a series of delicious twists and turns. Who killed her? This is what Justine, a depressed police officer in charge of the investigation, will try to discover…
Borderline cops
Dicker, for his part, remains on his line as a weaver of thick mysteries, carried by a sense of thrilling action. A savage animal tells the story of two couples. Sophie and Arpad, lawyer and banker, are beautiful, rich and happy. They live in “the glass house”, in a wealthy suburb of Geneva. They sympathize with their neighbors, Karine and Greg. She’s a saleswoman, he’s a cop. They live in a building nicknamed “the wart” by the very chic local residents, because it stands out in the landscape. Greg, in love with Sophie, plays voyeur in the garden of the glass house. But his sneaky rounds will soon reveal the secrets of the perfect couple, linked to a dark robbery affair.
The ingredients of these two thrillers are the same: confrontation between characters from different social classes, cleverly orchestrated revelations about the reality hidden behind the trappings of the “world of the rich”, an obsessive investigation led by borderline cops and a breathtaking ending. . We prefer Musso for his humor and less predictable moves, but it’s up to you to choose your champion.
JOEL DICKER
Entering the ring
Several weeks before the book’s release, Joël Dicker’s press service sent journalists uncorrected proofs, the final version of the text before printing. Astonishment: the pages are crossed out with a watermark number making it impossible to reproduce and distribute the pages. The author plays paranoid, our reading is complicated. Not very sporty.
Opening
Joël Dicker attacks with a right hook: the prologue, which plunges us into the middle of the heist. ” Nobody moves ! » We remain frozen. Next page, left hook: we find ourselves twenty days earlier, alongside these characters, whom a perverse voyeur observes from their garden. The back and forth continues. We are stunned.
Speed
The author ofA savage animal always keeps an eye on the clock and masters his time to perfection. The book unfolds in three rounds, during which the writer makes brief shifts between past, present and future. Not a grain of sand interferes with his choreography between time and space.
Fighting style
In Dicker, we look for metaphor or trickery, in vain. His method is dry, he barely sweats and saves his literary gestures. Compared to Musso, who multiplies cultural references and figures of speech, his sobriety, which focuses everything on the progression of the story, is effective but austere.
Melee
The handsome Dicker relies on the aesthetics of his characters. Its heroine, Sophie, is sublime: “She was turning 40 and had never looked so beautiful. » Sexuality is of great concern to its protagonists. We make love, we practice onanism and even sexual games using ropes and handcuffs. But, when Dicker hits below the belt, it is without great precision or attention to detail. The public is hot, but not too hot.
Misstep
Dicker doesn’t take too many risks. Its sober style and its practiced technique betray a little soft stomach after a hundred pages. But the man then wakes us up with a formidable acceleration of the plot, which keeps us in suspense until the last page. Honor is safe.
THE FIRST WORDS “9:30 a.m. The two robbers had just entered the jewelry store simultaneously through two different access points. The first by the main entrance, like an ordinary customer. […] The other, hooded, had passed through the service entrance, forcing an employee to open the door for him under threat of a sawed-off shotgun. »
GUILLAUME MUSSO
Entering the ring
On the cover of his novel, under the title, there is a spinning sentence: “There are three truths: my truth, your truth, the truth. » The fight has not yet started, but the public is already excited, their brains in turmoil.
Opening
Musso goes for a good uppercut. Its first chapter depicts the savage aggression of its heroine on the deck of her luxury yacht. “Recognizing the features of her attacker, Oriana was seized with fear and understood that all struggle was in vain,” writes the author, hitting his reader with an obsessive question: who did it?
Speed
After this resounding introduction, Musso plays it furtive with a beautiful series of jabs, rapid direct messages aimed at destabilizing. In fifteen pages, he lines up press articles which set the scene and shake up our gray matter. He will use this type of artifice (articles, sketches, Wikipedia pages, etc.) on multiple occasions. Dynamic!
Fighting style
The author multiplies the back and forth between eras and characters, in a ballet where beautiful images dance (“watercolor sky, silvery waves, silhouettes of birds à la Georges Braque”) and shocking sentences (“she felt shitty and she was scared”). He sometimes bombards us with references (Chekhov, Sartre, Nietzsche, etc.). But his story feints amaze us.
Melee
Musso is sentimental. Under his pen, there is little fuss: the violence is not too graphic, the sex is more romantic than organic. Her heroines are fragile, like Justine, the policewoman. “She felt like she was just a big thing out of breath.” writes Musso. At one point, she even has gastro. This won’t stop him from finding his way back to love. We agree.
Misstep
Page 37, Guillaume Musso forgets all the rules of “noble art” and throws out a gory comparison: “The murder cases […] take the time to infuse, to germinate until the truth spurts out without warning like pus from a boil. » The stunned audience wipes away the fluids that have splashed on them. The champion will no longer venture into the dermatological metaphor. Relief.
THE FIRST WORDS “It’s the sky that grabs you from the start. Mediterranean, hypnotic. A flat surface of deep blue that made you dizzy. The air was pure, devoid of humidity, crossed here and there by the flight of seagulls above the boat. »
2024-03-03 20:07:38
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