Mathieu Larnaudie

Born in Blois in 1977, Mathieu Larnaudie is the author of a dozen books, including Strangulation (2007), published by Gallimard, and Les Effondrés (2010), Acharnement (2012) and Notre désir est sans remède (2015), published by Actes Sud. He recently published Trash Vortex (Actes Sud, 2024). For seventeen years, he co-directed the magazine and publishing house Inculte, founded in 2004. He is a member of the collective of the same name. A resident at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2019-2020, he has been continuing his editorial activities at Seuil since 2021.

‘You must change your life’: this injunction concludes a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke dedicated to a statue of Apollo’s torso. It is also a kind of leitmotif that guides the narrator through this novel, which recounts a series of metamorphoses, a change of life.
A young historian has just arrived in Rome as a member of the French School. He is to work in the Vatican archives. He is particularly interested in a little-known episode from the Second World War, the story of Syndrome K. While conducting his research, he meets Sara, a painting restorer. She gradually reawakens his interest in works of art and, beyond that, in the world around him.