"This is my whole life," says Charlotte Salomon in 1942, as she hands her confidante a suitcase full of pictures, the best of her life's work, even though she is only twenty-five years old. However, his life is headed for a gas chamber, where he will soon end. All that remains are the pictures, and they - and now the pages of the new Foenkinos novel - tell Charlotte's story with powerful colors and unvarnished honesty. His childhood in Berlin in the twenties, his mother's early, tragic death, his strange relationship with his family, his entry into Berlin's artistic circles, his academic years and the beginning of his career. And then: his escape from the Nazis to the South of France, his last, short period of hope and love before destruction, which shone even in the midst of wartime upheavals.
"I felt that I had to write line by line in order to catch my breath," says the French author, who is well-known in our country for his mostly cheerful books, from his strange, but all the more spectacular internationally successful novel. What is certain is that this book presents not only a great portrait of an extraordinary woman, a marked arc of a tragic fate, but also the heart-wrenching story of an investigation.