Camille Cambon, a 48-year-old forensic doctor in Paris, will discover how her father, mother and godfather – all now deceased –, medical students obsessed with the disappearance of Goya’s skull and the origin of the Spanish painter’s genius , had founded a secret brotherhood. Goya who wanted to distort the world to “get as close as possible to the truth of beings beneath their appearances”. After The dark ones (2019) and Saturn (2020), psychoanalyst and novelist Sarah Chiche dives back in with The alchemies in a rather opaque family past. From the true and never elucidated theft of Goya’s relics, through the Bordeaux of the 1960s and the Paris of today, between perverted thriller and picaresque novel, The alchemies is above all a quite captivating quest through which a woman exhumes and confronts her parents’ troubled past. But it is also a reflection on the alchemy of elective affinities and the emancipatory power of art.
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