Leonardo's Judas, Leo Perutz, Martine Kayser

Long unknown - despite Borges' admiration for him - Perutz (1882-1957), a Jew native of Prague, condemned to exile after the publication of The Swedish Cavalier (1936), had to wait until the 1980s to see his work almost entirely translated into French - and critics hail him as a kind of "picaresque Kafka". (DOMINIQUE FERNANDFZ) Milan, 1498... Leonardo da Vinci is working on his famous Last Supper and is searching in vain for a model for the figure of his "Judas". He frequents all the bad places, reviews all the scoundrels in the area, but the vices he discovers are evidently those that Jesus would have forgiven. But Jesus did not forgive Judas... What if, instead of looking among those whom society designates as its black sheep, Leonardo were to take a look at those called "respectable people"... A quest rich in colorful encounters - and one of the most devious novels imagined by the diabolical Leo Perutz.