Kamer op Zee or also known as 6 degrés de liberté (roughly translated as A Room at Sea) is a novel from Canadian writer Nicolas Dickner.
As far as I know there hasn't been an english translation yet, which I foresee happening in the future.
Already three times I have deleted what I've tried to write about this novel, I find it difficult to grasp what this novel is about, what I want others to take with them.
Alright, let's start small..
1. It's fun.
2. It's not too long.
3. It has a whole bunch of chapters, most of them not longer than three or four pages. Can be easy when you don't read as much, but I found it annoying. It sometimes felt a little like morse, but maybe that's one of the underlying themes.
4. It's about shipping containers.
Not sold yet.
It's actually quite a good book about a boy and a girl and their experiment.
And it all takes place on a shipping container going from harbour to harbour.
It's actually the kind of over the top project I searched for when I was young. A sort of out of control tree house. A project that made me feel like it was impossible and yet I couldn't wait to begin.
I like that. The challenge of trying to see if I finally came up with something that just wasn't possible. And the thrill when I figured everything out.
That's the core of this novel.
And besides the "room at sea" navigated by Lisa and Eric, there's also room for one investigator that tries to puzzle everything together. She starts with knowing almost as little as yourself, but as she finds the right clues and comes closer and closer to the truth, you also have that exhilarated feeling of solving a puzzle.
So, for me, this novel combined two things in life I love doing.
1. Doing something bat crazy and over the top without thinking how much effort and time it could take.
2. Finding the needle in the haystack.
That's why I liked this novel.
It was very satisfactory.
