In read mode: a fascinating fictionalized bio

DAY

With this book, French writer Laurent Seksik brings to life three people who helped Franz Kafka become eternal.  

This is not the first time that Frenchman Laurent Seksik has attempted to tell the last moments of a famous writer. In 2010 it was those of Stefan Zweig (in The last days of Stefan Zweig), and we are now entitled to those of Franz Kafka, who died in June 1924 of fulminant tuberculous laryngitis.

We will thus go back nearly 100 years, to a a time when to cure this type of disease, there was only luck, fresh air, rest and glasses of milk drunk on the chain (we didn't quite understand why). A treatment that Kafka would undergo in 1921 at the Matliary sanatorium in the High Tatras mountains, where he would meet Robert Klopstock, who would become one of his closest friends.

Kafka's holy trinity

The interest of this novel is to introduce us to three people – including Klopstock – who played a key role in Kafka's life. Whether during his lifetime or afterwards. Because if it may seem incredible today, the author of The metamorphosiswas not very popular in its time and had not managed to get much published. Before he died, he had even requested that all of his unpublished manuscripts be burned. So, if he had been listened to and if these people had not been there, we would never have been able to read such major works as The trial or The castle .

A fictionalized biography that we loved very much.

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Thrills guaranteed

Screams

Very quickly, we will learn that five women have been kidnapped by a twisted of the worst kind. The kind of twisted who likes to make his victims suffer in every way possible and imaginable until death ensues. Or almost, since thanks to the tenacity of a solitary cop, one of them will be found still alive… but in such a terrible state that in order not to shock anyone, we will refrain from entering here in detail. 

This brings us to point out in passing that you have to have strong enough nerves to appreciate this bloody thriller in a rather flat style – but effective! 

< p>A race against time

To return to the twisted, he will find an unstoppable way to attract the attention of the commissioner without delay Victor Venturi, France's most famous policeman: take a direct stab at one of his co-workers, the expert psychologist and criminologist Olivia Montalvert – whom everyone calls Menthe-à-l'eau. 

This is where the game will begin and where the needle of our stress meter will fall into the red. Because to save the four other women who are held somewhere by the twisted, Venturi and his team will only have two days…