“The Mystery of Henri Pick” is my not-so-mysterious pick for a good read as I prepare for an upcoming visit to France.
Penned by French wordsmith David Foenkinos, originally as “Le Mystere Henri Pick” (2016), and translated into English in 2020 by Sam Taylor under Pushkin Press, it provides intrigue and playfulness at once.
The comic mystery takes us to Brittany, to an unassuming library by the sea that takes on any original book that has not found a publisher.
One condition is, you have to physically drop off a hard copy of the “rejected” book yourself.
It is essentially, in my words, a literary graveyard for your manuscripts to live on.
While visiting her parents, young editor Delphine Despero bikes to the library with her lover, a slightly bitter author who still feels like a failure since his own book didn’t become a hit.
There, they come across an extraordinary novel attributed to the late Henri Pick, a local pizza chef.
Despero is desperate to meet the talented author, but the mystery deepens when Pick’s widow insists her late husband could not have written the book. He never liked to read, she says, and she would have known.
As questions begin to swirl around Henri Pick and his unlikely literary success, Despero brings the book back to Paris, where it becomes an instant hit.
The result is a mystery about literary fame, ambition, authorship and how well we really know the people around us.
What I appreciated most about this book is that it trusts the readers to be intelligent enough to fill in the space between the lines. I like how the narrative provides just enough context and description without drowning in details.
I read the book at a quiet cafe and found myself stopping to take a break every few pages to reflect. One part of it made me cry.
It is a book about wanting to literally and literarily linger. It is a poetic reminder that if we have the courage to put pen to paper, maybe someone, somewhere, will get to revive us — or the version of us who wrote a fantastic book — long after we depart this world.
