Sara Chiche, author of Alchemies. “The book moves from one style to another, from Grey’s Anatomy to thriller, then to picaresque novel.”

Back alchemies, Sara Chiche leaves autobiographical territory The dark ones and: Saturn for art. Through the quest of its heroine Camille, a forensic pathologist who tries to uncover the past of her parents and godfather, a mysterious e-mail. About alchemy. in the life of the artist, whose existence and work are transformed after a crisis in which he thought he would die, working in the life of Camille, who undergoes unexpected metamorphoses and initiations or even alchemies. a sense of selective kinship with “these great friendships like love” that bound, among others, Camille’s father and her godfather. Romantic passion, central within Saturn and in the dark However, this is where the passion of all the protagonists of research leaves room Alchemies obsessed in one way or another with the search for the origin of genius and/or truth in the book itself, alchemical, which transforms as it is read, taking many forms, from a social novel to a thriller to a picaresque adventure novel, in the background. “black paintings” and Parisian catacombs…

Madame Figaro. – Why did you decide to put your book under the umbrella of the character of Francisco de Goya?

Sarah Chiche. – He is an artist I first discovered as a teenager through his engravings Disasters of war and his Black paints shown at the Prado. Years later I learned the story of his skull stolen after his burial in Bordeaux in 1828. I investigated and discovered that he was a man of a thousand lives. He came from a family of peasants who, due to a change of fortune, were forced to settle in the dry lands of Aragon. He was so ambitious that he first did everything to please the powerful and become a court painter, going so far as to marry without love a woman whose family was introduced to the sovereign’s circle. For a long time, he was the first to produce canvases that fully corresponded to the current taste.

Until her life is turned upside down ?

In Seville in 1792 he suffered a neurological crisis from which he emerged radically changed. Overnight, he flees honors, begins to denounce the return of the Inquisition to Spain, and becomes an implacable and visionary observer of our world. His painting metamorphoses, as a result The Caprices, The Disasters of War And Black pictures – including famous Saturn devours his children – which he painted on the walls of the house where he lived, on the heights of Madrid… Amazing contemporary works. How did Goya become Goya? What the hell was going on in his head? My heroes and I are far from the only ones obsessed with the origin of intelligence and genius. Before focusing on the brains of 20th century elites^e century that prompted a smart guy to steal Einstein’s brain after he died, we’ve been obsessed with skulls.

Where did the theft of Goya’s skull come from?

Indeed. Phrenology, a theory that has since thankfully fallen into disuse, posited that our vices and virtues were written in the projections of our skulls. Which led to the skull-stealing epidemic that I also describe in this novel, for example Beethoven or Descartes. Did Goya appear in Spain and then be hacked by a medical student? At the Bordeaux cabaret from which he disappeared. According to another theory, was he taken to the back rooms of Saint-Anne Hospital in Paris? If the entire novel is built from these hypotheses and the search for this skull, then what it tells is the story of our time. the frantic search of a woman, her parents and her godfather between scientific passion and recklessness.

The search for Goya’s skull, what he tells, is the story of our time. the frantic search of a woman, her parents and her godfather between scientific passion and recklessness.

Sarah Chiche

Indeed, however, the main character is a woman: Camille, a medical examiner…

She is a lonely, fighting, imperfect but brave woman, a slave to the priesthood of medicine and obsessed with the idea of ​​doing justice, because in forensic medicine it is a matter of finding the exact causes of a person’s death. . At the beginning of the novel, we find him in a crisis hospital, surrounded by a whole gallery of characters – his colleagues, the head of the department, with whom burlesque events take place. Camille is certainly clumsy with her teenage daughter or her ex, but she doesn’t suffer from her loneliness and doesn’t need a partner to live her life. He keeps things aloof, displaying a coolness that is as much about his career as a gifted old kid as it is about his profession as a coroner. When you are a doctor, you are strictly in right action and truth exhumation.

Doesn’t that go back to what you do as a writer?

Absolutely. It is truly an alchemical act of writing, of exhuming, transmuting, and transmuting matter. As in alchemy, where there are three stages: work in black, white, then red, to effect the transformation of lead into gold, the book undergoes various transformations, passing from one style to another… It begins as social; a novel we are in a public hospital crisis in 2022 and the book contains codes for certain medical series, Grey’s Anatomy has Good doctor. Then Camille gets this email about Goya, the artist her father wrote a book about in his early youth, and we leave. Grey’s Anatomy for a thriller, then for a picaresque novel that will take us from Bordeaux to the catacombs of Paris…

When you are a doctor, you are strictly searching for the right gesture and the expression of truth

Sarah Chiche

How much have you been affected? Work in black By Marguerite Yourcenar, whom you quote.

That’s an effect I claim. I wanted to pay homage to Marguerite Yoursenaar’s very beautiful writing and to the character of Zeno, the Renaissance man, the humanist who would go through a whole series of initiatory trials in the service of the search to love and be loved by people. women, there are a thousand: doctor, priest, healer, alchemist. And who, when he dies, reaches revelation, because death is indeed the supreme alchemical act… And this also repeats the novel of Urcenar, what a certain Fieros gesture tells us at the end. Alchemies.

Zeno is also scattered among your two heroes.

Yes, Pierre, Camille’s father, who will become a great forensic doctor, is, in Marguerite Yoursenaar’s terminology, the adventurer of knowledge. He gets lost in his research and his passion for Goya, wondering where his skull is, how the artist came to paint his pictures… Meanwhile, Alexander, destined to become a leader in neuroscience, is an adventurer of power, obsessed with what is . In the head of Goya and in the head of all of us, with the possibilities provided by MRI and later artificial intelligence, as much as the fact of reaching the top.