Few people will miss it, because its PR machine is extremely oiled: early Tuesday morning, 22 years after the global megaseller The Da Vinci Codeat the same time the new thriller of the American writer Dan Brown was published in eighteen countries. In The Secret of Secretstranslated as The ultimate secretBrown’s well -known protagonist Robert Langdon, professor of symbolism, as usual in a race against the clock, has to shuffle an exciting and dangerous mystery that touches on modern science and age -old mystical knowledge. Some book stores opened extra early on Tuesday morning.
Just like in the previous thrillers of Dan Brown, the story plays against the background of a beautiful old city, this time – visitors to the book presentation in an Amsterdam canal house received a advertising brochure from the Czech Temisitczechia in addition to the 5.4 centimeters thick book, 765 pages.
During the book presentation, at seven o’clock in the morning, it became clear how big in recent months the secrets had not only been, but also around the book. It couldn’t be put anywhere in the cloud and certainly not emailed, said Who is De Mol?-presenter Rik van de Westelaken, who talked to each other the morning and recorded the audio book. For the names and difficult words that he wanted to practice in advance, had a laptop somewhere in the city with The ultimate secret are taken out of a safe; The words it was all about were written there on paper for him. He could say that now, he said cheerfully: “The confidentiality statement has just expired.”
200,000 secure books
For publisher Luitingh Sijthoff it was the greatest logistics operation of the year, confirmed director Febe van der Wardt. The ultimate secret Of course, it was not allowed to be hacked and just appear on the internet. It was also required from the United States that the more than 200,000 books that Luitingh Sijthoff had printed had to be stored securely, also in the book stores where they were brought on Monday evening. And translators Erica Feberwee and Yolande Ligterink should have done their work at a secret location, without the internet. They had turned gray, joked from the Westelaken.
Dan Brown in 2020.
Photo Cody O’Loughlin
While four happy fans, winners of a competition on social media, withdrawn into a corner to read, it became clear in two presentations of which religious mystical Brown’s book is announced this time. Art historian Karin Braamhorst, author of Sense and nonsense of the da vinci code (2006), said that the aureool, classically the jet wreath around the head of the sun god and then also depicted with Christian saints, does not depict the radiation of wisdom in the new brown, but it is precisely to receive it: “What man has consciousness comes from outside.” From a consciousness outside of us, which we have to tune into.
And Geert Kimpen, author of the novel The kabbalist (2007), explained how Emperor Rudolf II bothered the Jews in the sixteenth century that Rabbi Loew felt forced to make a Golem, a clay figure to protect them. But as it goes in such stories, De Golem got its own consciousness and became dangerous. A metaphor for AI, that may be clear.
The greatest question
Dan Brown was not present; He comes to the Netherlands in October. On a short video he said that he never shuns big questions in his novels and that this time he had focused on the greatest question: that of consciousness, and how it influences the physical world. We can expect particle physics in the book, there is a character in it as reincarnation of a 16th-century, and, surprise: main character Robert Langdon, the eternal bachelor, who always encounters so handy beautiful smart women to resolve mysteries, is in love! And on noëtic scientist Katherine Solomon, from Brown’s earlier book The Lost Symbol (The lost symbol2009). Already in Chapter 1, in bed, Langdon admiringly “his gaze goes over her finely drawn traits. She was four years older than him, but he was over and again struck by her beauty.” A pity for him that she disappears shortly afterwards. Yes, the fans have a lot to enjoy, and next year the eight-part Netflix series will follow to the book.