What dark forces link a Parisian forensic doctor to the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya?
This fifth title by the French psychoanalyst (which was shortlisted for the Femina Prize and among the finalists for the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française) projects us from its first words into a murky and sinister atmosphere.
Sarah Chiche wields the pen like a sharp scalpel to describe the crudest horror: “stretchers wet with blood on which a crush of bodies rest”; “They drink, they smoke, they stew bones in bleach.”
In the wake of the Paris-Descartes University mass grave affair, which shook the Parisian academic and medical world a few years ago, forensic doctor Camille Cambon is experiencing an existential crisis. “I no longer know if you have to be crazy to become a doctor or if it is the practice of medicine that ends up destroying our reason,” she said to herself.
A mysterious message about Goya pushes her to leave for Bordeaux, where an old friend of her parents and her godfather, all three of whom are dead, will tell her the story behind their obsession with the famous painter – which occupies the entire second part of the novel.
A foray into the tragic excesses and experiments of young medical students, even into the darkness of the catacombs where a secret society of doctors will be created, this dark and daring novel explores the destructive impulses hidden behind the great genius and the demon of awareness.
