[Book Review] Mystery of Yellow Room (Translated version) by Gaston Leroux

Now, first I wanna say sorry to this book because I’ve just recently finished reading it despite already bought it since last year. There’s several reasons to that, though, and one of them are included on the reasons (reason-ception) on why I should make a review about this book.

Okay, so as I said before I bought this book on the late of 2014 when I went on a driven-by-boredom-and-broken-heart weekend shopping. I was curious since the cover is so bright it almost outshined the neon lamp of the book store, and since it was sitting on the front row of the New Release rack so I just had the urge to give this little book my attention. First glance of the cover I thought it looked cool, with a classic and minimalist design of old France (I don’t know the name, mind you) decoration and an illustration of a small window. And of course don’t forget the yellow color that suits perfectly with the title. Overall, the exterior of the book seems nice at the moment.

That leads me to the next step, which is reading the synopsis. To my surprise, it was even better. To sum up the story, it was about a young journalist named Roulletible who was shockingly uncover the murder attempt case of Mademoiselle Stagerson in the Yellow Room—a very isolated place where no one could come in or out without being noticed. These were the words that got me hooked: “…Bagaimana kejahatan dapat terjadi di tempat yang tidak bisa dimasuki oleh orang lain? Bagaimana pelaku bisa keluar dari ruang tertutup? Apa motif dibalik tindakan pelaku? Siapa pelakunya? Bagaimana pula Roulletible membogkar kasus tersebut dengan begitu mencengangkan?” Sounds promising, right? And with that, I ended up buying the book.

But what disappoint me is that when I read the first line of the first chapter… oh boy, it was really REALLY poorly translated. It was so far from my expectation of a cleanly written (translated) book of detective tales. The words are overlapping with each other and so it makes the sentence much longer than it could have been. And of course that also result in an ineffective series of sentence that makes even one paragraph is so burdensome to read. It was like the translator just simply translated the original book paragraph by paragraph through google translate and pasted it just as it is. It reminds me of one of my college assignments in which we had to make a resume of a book written in a really advanced English (you know that kind of English where the author seem to use so much of thesaurus, yeah that kind), and we just, like, put sentence by sentence to google translate and pasted the translated version to our assignments. And because of that, during the first-read of this book I can only finish the first 3 chapters as it was so uncomfortable to read.

And so, the year goes on and I eventually forget about this book which was sitting on the back of my bookshelf. Only recently I finally gathered the motivation to finish what I’ve started… and I read it all over again. Turns out, the storyline is not that bad, as expected. It was full of thrill and suspense here and there, especially on a few last chapters when Roulletible has ‘seen’ the murder. Even though, I have to read some part for, like, 2 or 3 times before I get what it meant—because of the rough and hard-to-understand translation of course—but when I got to the ending… that was the moment when I could finally say: “Damn, why didn’t I finish this book earlier”. But really, for me the ending is the greatest thing in this book. It was surprising, genius, and entertainingly twisted. I like how Leroux had idea of making that one essential character as the culprit (I won’t give any spoiler, you have to guess. Tee-hee~).

Overall, I think this book is nice if I had just read it in its original version. I mean, the English version since the original version is written in French and I don’t understand any single French. But for this to be translated to Bahasa? I would only give 2 out of 5 stars.

***

Title: Mystery of Yellow Room
Writer: Gaston Leroux
Publisher: Visi Media
Page Count: 320 pages

Score
Storyline: 4/5
Diction: 2/5
Cover: 3/5
Overall: 3.5/5