“Lives only have meaning if we can fulfil these three destinies: to love, to be loved, and know how to forgive”
I had been captivated by Swiss writer Joel Dicker’s first book, the runaway critically and reader acclaimed The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair – both a murder mystery/investigation and a book about writing, writer’s block and matters literary. So I was delighted to be offered his second as an ARC, here translated from the original French by Alison Anderson.
The Baltimore Boys stands as both prequel and sequel to ‘Harry Quebert’. The central character Marcus Goldman (the writer of Harry Quebert) looks back to the original genesis of his writing inspiration – his childhood, and his friendship with his cousin Hillel, and a less privileged boy, Woody – the Baltimore Boys, and in present time, he has already published ‘Quebert’ and, once again, is finding the process of writing hard.
Why do I write? Because books are stronger than life. They are the finest revenge we can take on life. They are the witnesses from the impregnable wall of our mind, the unassailable fortress of our memory
In fact, he has taken himself away from the distractions of the city (New York) to a quiet, suburban house in Florida, where his neighbours are affluent and retired, and nothing happens. He is in search of tranquillity to help the creative juices flow.
A chance encounter with a stray dog causes Marcus’ boyhood, as a third member of the Baltimore Boys gang, to come flooding back to him, as the dog’s owner is a significant figure from his past.
Marcus was the only son of the ‘Montclair Goldmans’ . His father Nathan was the less successful Goldman Brother. The star brother, and the one whom Marcus hero-worshipped, along with his beautiful wife Anita, was Saul. Saul and Anita were wealthy, golden, successful and admired. They and their only son Hillel were the Baltimore Goldmans.
However, as we discover, at the start of the book – the Golden Baltimores somehow became mired in tragedy. Jumping back and forth in time-frames from 1989 to the present day, Marcus is writing his past, his present, and, perhaps his future. This book, The Baltimore Boys, will be a celebration of the people he loved whose lives were less blessed than he thought, and will also be a way to come to terms with accepting loss, and broken illusions.
I loved ‘Quebert’ though at times I found it a little over tricksy. Baltimore Boys, despite all the jumping back and forth in time, seems a much more traditional progression – Goldman lets us know what he intends to reveal to us, before we ever get there – the books very first sentence, its prologue, tells us that in 2004 his boyhood friend, his adopted cousin Woody, is about to start a 5 year prison sentence the next day. We are then immediately taken to Part One, which begins in 1989, The Book of Lost Youth.
I found The Baltimore Boys intensely moving. Marcus, for all his acclaimed fame, has a kind of bruised, attractive diffidence, and a much greater warmth and integrity than he believes he has. This is both a love story, a loss story, and a celebration of the importance of friendship, and of family, those difficult, sometimes impossible ties between siblings and close kin.
And it is full of delicious observations. The back and forth time frames also pinpoint subtle and not so subtle changes in society
There was a time when astronauts and scientists were the stars. Nowadays our stars are people who do nothing and spend their time taking selfies or pictures of their dinner
Above all, Joel Dicker knows how to tell an old story, the rite of passage from child to sadder, wiser man, freshly and engagingly
The Baltimore Boys will be published in English on May 18th It has already been a popular success in the original French, published in 2015, and in Spanish translation.
Mouthwatering description. Is the novel as immensely long as Quebert? Like you, I much enjoyed that novel, but it required a slab of time to read . . .
I had to check as I wrote and scheduled the review quite some time ago – my sense was that I had devoured this quite quickly – and it turns out to be a good 200 pages shorter than Quebert – so perhaps a slice, rather than a slab!
I think the term you seek is “less of a slab.”
Still, I liked the first book well enough that I’ll doubtless be tackling this one sooner or later . . .
Intriguing review Lady F. I’ve been considering Quebert, and I might have seen a copy in the charity shop at the weekend. If it’s still there on Saturday it might just come home with me…. 🙂
Same! I keep seeing it in the charity bookshop and I’ve been showing uncharacteristic restraint. Like you, if it’s still there this weekend, it’s found a new home 😉
I hope you and Karen don’t use the same charity shop!
I believe we live miles apart, but I definitely saw more than one copy in mine 🙂
I hope you and Madame Bibi don’t use the same charity shop!
Soooo, the earlier book was slammed for unconvincing dialogue and excessive length. Do you agree with that? And if yes, does this one follow suit? I love the excerpts you’ve highlighted….
Well, I was engaged by both books, but fell a little short on some of the mindgame twists of Quebert. This one has a greater warmth, a more heartful engagement and is also shorter. I really warmed to the central character too – same character as in Quebert, but again, the reader gets to feel alongside him, as the story is about his emotion, as much as anything else, and he is a compassionate man
I still haven’t read anything by Dicker, despite being tempted whenever I walk into any bookshelf, and now your review has left me with a dilemma – which should I read first, ‘The Truth’ or ‘The Balimore Boys’? You say the second books is a prequel/sequel and is also shorter, but then I don’t want to end up approaching things in the wrong order …
TBH, I really don’t feel I would have lost anything if I had read this first – both books do a lot of time jumping. Quebert is I think ‘cleverer’, this one engaged me far more with the central character. I am almost minded to re-read Quebert with the added layer of what I now know about the narrator of both
I still haven’t read anything by Dicker, despite being tempted whenever I walk into any bookshelf
Oo, painful.
There were so many potential typos in that sentence … seems I couldn’t avoid them all!
🙂
Typos caused by malevolent umps built into predictive on a tablet, not to mention the dreaded and inspired far finger syndrome on a tap tap tablet are the name of my life.
I left all the ones in the paragraph above, unaltered. Why did the tablet substitute umps (surely not a real word?) for imps? Not to mention, when I typed dreaded and unspotted fat finger syndrome, the bizarre substitution of inspired far finger! I won’t claim to be completely clear and coherent at all times, but unspotted is very different from inspired! I think the resident imp that controls my tablet must be Mrs UberMalaprop!
Oh, and I typed bane of my life, not name. And just spotted bane being changed to babe, in the nick of time!
When I say the above made me laugh out loud I hope it’s clear I’m laughing with not at you (but definitely at the umps which clearly live in my phone!)
Till I started posting comments etc from my tablet and phone, as opposed to keyboard which doesn’t automatically do substitutes, I used to tut and sneer at how inarticulate and incoherent the human race seemed to have become, recently. And then I got a smartphone, and a tablet, both of which I might use. And discovered that whilst auto-correct of typos, and being able to swipe-up a partially typed word was very useful, the software was either very buggy – or perhaps, indeed, programmed by a mischievous ump!
Yep. The automatic spelling “correction” happens to my wife with the email program on her Mac, too, and she can’t find out where to switch it off. It’s a real nuisance, and I’m sure one day is going to lead to harmful consequences.