The perfect murder as a chimera: Julie Wolkenstein's game with truth and power

Microchimerism as a narrative key

Julie Wolkenstein's novel, published in 2026 Chimera (POL) unfolds against the backdrop of the first pandemic-related lockdown in spring 2020 as a multifaceted, polyphonic reconstruction of a seemingly closed criminal case. At the heart of this work, conceived as a mock crime novel, lies the mysterious death of the despotic art collector Osmond, who fell to his death from a parapet of the Pincio in Rome in April 1994 after an exhibition opening. The author, a renowned expert and translator of Henry James, creates a rich intertextual resonance with his classic work. The Portrait of a Lady The five narrators – the blind Aunt Lidia, the alcoholic Amelia, the investigative journalist Henriette, the enigmatic Serena, and Osmond's widow Isabelle – act as modern-day equivalents of James's characters. Through their diverse forms of communication, ranging from dictated emails to psychoanalytic sessions via video conference and private computer notes, they construct the image of a "lopard" whose claim to power and psychological subjugation (hold) shaped the biographies of these women for decades.

This fragmented family investigation uses the biological paradox of microchimerism as a narrative key to question the boundaries of truth and identity. The title Chimera This refers not only to the mythological hybrid creature, but also to the scientific fact that an individual can carry two genetically distinct sets of DNA, which in the novel leads to the murderer's exoneration in a DNA test. This thematic constellation raises compelling questions for interpretation: To what extent does the motif of the "Bocca della Verità" function as a metaphor for the relativity of historical and moral judgments? How does the temporal distance and the post-MeToo perspective of the narrators alter the evaluation of Osmond's tyranny and Serena's act? And finally: Does Isabelle succeed in finally freeing herself from the "cage" of Osmond's influence through the reconstruction of the past, or does every memory ultimately remain a chimeric construct that, as James-Exergue puts it, never tells "everything"?

Literary criticism classifies Chimera as a turning point in Julie Wolkenstein's body of work, which now spans over a quarter of a century. The novel is examined from several key perspectives: After Wolkenstein had recently published two "brilliant" autobiographical narratives – Et toujours en été (2020) and The Estuary Route (2023) –, both of which were marked by personal bereavements and family losses, marks Chimera their return to pure fiction. Nevertheless, critics like Virginie Bloch-Lainé see in Libération a connection: While the predecessors were directly autobiographical (for example, about the death of her little brother), the new novel offers "keys" to understand her fictional universe in a less glittering light.

Although almost all of Wolkenstein's novels "more or less take the form of an investigation," Chimera It has been hailed as her first explicit crime novel ("polar"). Critics emphasize that with this tenth novel, she has fulfilled a long-held dream of working in a genre she particularly appreciates as a reader. Cécile Dutheil de la Rochère describes the work as a "false crime novel, but a genuine little novelistic structure" that concentrates all the personal and imaginative components of her artistic output. Literary critics highlight Wolkenstein's profile as a "fine lettrée" and an expert on Henry James. Her professional background as a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Caen directly informs the structure of the novel, which is a virtuoso play with James's portrait of a lady and whose motives (manipulation, money, unclear family relationships) are read. This intertextual depth leads to her being placed in the tradition of British female authors and their "little private hells" in critical discourse rather than in contemporary French literature. Chimera It is interpreted as a work that perfects Wolkenstein's predilection for choral storytelling and playing with the hidden, by combining a "diabolically efficient" crime plot with deep literary reflection.

The five female characters and their narrative techniques

The “Bocca della Verità” (the Mouth of Truth) functions in Julie Wolkenstein’s novel as a central symbol for the impossibility of absolute truth and the relativity of historical and moral judgments, a theme the sources describe as a “crossing of truths, lies, and anxieties.” Since the provided source excerpts do not contain a verbatim paragraph with this motif, the following quotation relies on the metaphor established in the history of conversation (please note that this specific passage is not taken from the sources and should be independently verified):

This paragraph illustrates Osmond's nihilistic and manipulative worldview, which critics have characterized as "cold, manipulative, and megamaniacal." For him, truth is not an objective good, but a matter of perspective—a viewpoint reflected in the novel's structure as a "fragmented family investigation." The "Bocca della Verità" (mouth of truth) serves as a paradoxical image: while mythologically destined to expose liars, Osmond views it as a "gueule de pierre" (a stone maw) that ultimately remains silent. This corresponds to the novel's James exergue: "On ne dit jamais tout" (One never tells everything).

The interpretation of this motif links the criminal plot with the psychological depth of the characters. Because the novel uses five different female voices to reconstruct the events of 1994 from the distance of 2020, there is no single authority, like the mythical mouth, to deliver a final judgment. Instead, truth and lies blend into a mosaic of chimeric perceptions. Serena, who possesses a particular talent for dissimulation, uses the ambiguity of truth to her advantage. Just as the "bocca" in the quote is described as "empty and silent," the ultimate judgment regarding guilt in Osmond's death remains suspended between legitimate self-defense and premeditated murder. The truth, as the title suggests, is therefore a chimera – a hybrid of “transfigured or recomposed souvenirs” that defies simple binary classification as “true” or “false”.

The heart of the novel is the "Quintet pour un 'salopard'," five women whose lives were inextricably linked to the charismatic but tyrannical art collector Osmond. Wolkenstein assigns each of these narrators her own form of communication and a specific narrative technique, which underscores the polyphonic nature of the work.

Aunt LidiaThe opening line of the book represents the perspective of a detached observer. At 85, almost blind and deaf, she dictates an email to her assistant Anna, addressed to her "nephew" Henri. Her style is characterized by a certain arrogance and a "biscuit perfume," a slightly old-fashioned charm. She emphasizes her independence: "Personne n'a jamais réussi à me 'faire faire' quoi que ce soit." For her, the past is closed, but through Henri's questions, she becomes the unwitting chronicler of the family history.

AmeliaAmelia, Osmond's sister, forms the sharpest contrast to Lidia. In an alcohol-fueled monologue on her rooftop in Florence, she reveals a world of gossip, sexual promiscuity, and deep resentment. Her form of communication is soliloquy: "Personne ne sait que je parle toute seule." She employs "raisonnement par induction," inductive reasoning, which, however, often remains stuck in hypotheses. Amelia is the one who sows the first seeds of doubt about the official version of Osmond's death and hints at the incestuous atmosphere within the family.

HenrietteIsabelle's best friend, a journalist, represents the archetypal investigator who strives for objective truth. Her narrative consists of computer notes for an article she will never write. She is obsessed with facts and reconstructing the 1994 case. In doing so, she critically reflects on changing moral values, particularly in the context of the #MeToo movement. She recognizes that Osmond's influence on Isabelle was a form of "emprise"—a psychological subjugation.

Serena Serena is the most complex character, the "pièce maîtresse d'un quintette de femmes" (the masterpiece of a quintet of women). She confesses to her murder of Osmond in sessions with a psychoanalyst via video conference during the lockdown. Serena sees herself as monstrous: "Ma mère qui a fait de moi un monstre, une chimera, une femme incapable d'assumer sa maternité" (My mother who made me a monster, a chimera, a woman incapable of assuming her maternal rights). Her narrative is a confession that blurs the line between perpetrator and victim. She did not kill Osmond out of passion, but out of a cold, almost strategic necessity to protect her daughter Iris and Isabelle from his tyranny.

BuckskinOsmond's widow remains the least tangible character for a long time. Her part is narrated in the "classic" third person. She is the one who suffered most deeply under Osmond's control, a modern equivalent to Henry James's Isabel Archer. Her narrative thread is characterized by "souvenirs de souvenirs" and the inability to fully process the trauma. Only at the end of the novel, in 2024, does she find a form of reconciliation.

Playing with the hallmarks of the crime novel

Wolkenstein playfully engages with the conventions of the crime novel, yet consistently subverts them. There is a dead man (Osmond), a suspect (Serena), and a police investigation by Caterina Castelli. However, the suspense is not built around the question of "who," but rather the "why" and the "how of perception." The novel's method is an "enquête familiale éclatée"—a fragmented family investigation. The author uses the motif of the "Bocca della Verità," the mouth of truth, as a metaphor for the relativity of truth. Osmond himself proclaims during his art opening: "Trai ou fake? Tout dépend de l'instant choisi pour en juger…" (True or fake? It all depends on the moment chosen to judge it…). The crime is solved through the biological enigma of chimerism: Serena was exonerated by a DNA test because she carries two different sets of genes—she is her own "jumelle phantôme" (phantom twin). This is the “crime parfait” that Wolkenstein has constructed: A scientific paradox protects the murderer.

The constellation of characters is marked by unstable family relationships and a "parental trouble." Who is whose mother? This question runs through the novel like a red thread. The narrative strands span a wide range of time and space, from the women's youth in the 1970s to the 2020 lockdown and finally to the epilogue in 2024. Communication takes place via media that create distance: emails, monologues, digital notes, video calls. This reflects the isolation during the pandemic but also serves as a narrative tool to emphasize the unreliability of the narrators. Each woman filters the past through her own interests and wounds. As Raphaëlle Leyris writes in Le Monde ¹ writes, the book crosses “leurs points de vue, leurs vérités, leurs mensonges et leurs chagrins”.

This section is of fundamental importance, as it links the central motif of the chimera on three levels: the mythological, the psychological, and the biological. Serena, due to her own traumatic childhood, sees herself as "monstrous" and incapable of motherhood. Her silence—the metaphorical "cutting off of her tongue"—is the key moment that triggers the entire plot: she entrusts her daughter Iris to Osmond and later Isabelle to protect the child from her own perceived monstrosity. It is later revealed that Serena is also a chimera in a biological sense (she carries two different sets of DNA), which exonerates her criminally but forces her into a lifelong psychological charade. The novel's title also reflects its structure: a "chimera" of five different female voices and a blend of crime novel and psychological portrait. In this passage, Serena justifies her decision to disown her daughter Iris by comparing herself to Andersen's Little Mermaid. She interprets her silence not as weakness, but as a painful sacrifice to avoid jeopardizing her daughter's social integration through her own "abnormality." Serena perceives her identity as so fundamentally hybrid and outside any norm that she can only maintain contact with the "human community" through masquerade and concealing her motherhood. The paradox of her situation is that this act of apparent selflessness makes her complicit in Osmond's tyranny, and only decades later, during lockdown, does she begin to linguistically dismantle this "chimera" of her identity.

Metaphor and intertextual dimensions

The metaphor of photography is central. Osmond photographs slides that are projected onto a white wall, with the subject always off-center. This reflects the novel's narrative strategy: truth is never at the center, but always displaced, a projection of a projection.

Intertextually, the novel is deeply rooted in the work of Henry James. Furthermore, music plays a crucial role as a marker of time. The "Italo-Disco" playlist of the 70s and 80s, especially Raffaella Carràs' music, is particularly prominent. A far l'amore comincia your, functions as a “hymn of the novel”. These songs evoke a lightness that stands in sharp contrast to the gloom of the events, as Thierry Clermont writes in Le Figaro ² notes when he describes the novel as "cantate sombre".

Julie Wolkenstein's novel Chimera is explicitly intended as an intertextual response to Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881) conceived, which is already introduced by the James exergue "On ne dit jamais tout". The constellation of characters in Chimera The film almost mirrors James's characters: the protagonist Isabelle is the modern-day equivalent of Isabel Archer, the charismatic but tyrannical art collector Osmond remains the manipulative antagonist, and Serena takes on the role of Madame Merle as the ambivalent mastermind. While James explores the confrontation between American idealism and 19th-century European cynicism, Wolkenstein transforms this "emprise"—the psychological subjugation of women—into a contemporary context that re-evaluates the events in light of the #MeToo movement. Both works examine the destructive power of power relations and the deceptive nature of wealth, which, as James's Ralph Touchett observes, can imprison the individual in a "cage."

A significant contrast lies in the narrative form and genre structure. James' work is considered a precursor of psychological modernism, as it focuses primarily on the "stream of consciousness" (stream of consciousnessJames focuses on a single protagonist to depict her subjective development into a thinking subject. Wolkenstein, however, breaks with this unity and chooses the form of a "roman choral," in which five different female characters—from Aunt Lidia to Isabelle—take turns speaking. She uses the conventions of the crime novel ("faux roman policier") to reconstruct Osmond's mysterious death in 1994 from the distance of the 2020 lockdown. While James prioritizes the psychological drama of social conventions, Wolkenstein interweaves the plot with a scientific paradox: microchimerism, a biological puzzle that enables the "perfect murder" and protects the identity of the killer, Serena.

Finally, the two novels differ in their temporal setting and degree of resolution. James deliberately leaves the ending of his novel open (open endingIsabel's return to Rome remains an ambivalent gesture, poised between self-sacrifice and newfound autonomy. Wolkenstein, on the other hand, uses the time span between the deed and the present to liberate the female characters from their isolation and the "souvenirs de souvenirs." While James' protagonist, Isabel Archer, ends up in marriage as an "applied handled hung-up tool"—a mere instrument—and her home as a house of "suffocation" (suffocation) perceives, results in Chimera in a festive epilogue in 2024. In this finale, the survivors gather in Florence for a gesture of reconciliation, with the dark atmosphere of the past overlaid by the life-affirming sounds of an Italo-disco playlist ("A far l'amore comincia tu").

Comparison of the beginning and end of the novel

The comparison between the beginning and the end of the novel highlights its emotional and structural development: The book begins (2020) in an atmosphere of isolation and physical decay. Lidia is "almost blind" and lives in a "solitude" intensified by the lockdown. Communication is purely functional and digital. There is a mood of stagnation and suppressed secrets. The quote from James marks the beginning of a narrative based on gaps and silence. The ending (2024) presents a festive counterpoint. All the surviving protagonists gather in Florence for Lidia's 90th birthday. Isolation is lifted; there is dancing, drinking, and laughter. The "Bocca della Verità" (Mouth of Truth) has lost its terror. Isabelle and Serena grow closer: "Isabelle only needed half a second to decide that she was ready to make peace." While the beginning was marked by the inability to see (Lidia's blindness), the novel ends with a clear, albeit melancholic, view of the past. Raffaella Carrà's music brings the generations together. The "chimera" is no longer a menacing monster, but an accepted part of identity.

Contemporary critics praise Wolkenstein's ability to hybridize different genres. Virginie Bloch-Lainé ³ emphasized in LibérationThe novel utilizes the opportunities offered by the passage of time between 1994 and 2020 to re-evaluate the events in the light of #MeToo. Cécile Dutheil de la Rochère highlights the linguistic finesse: "to capture the infimes variations de vocabulaire, les nuances de registres et de niveaux de langue qui font le temps qui passe".

Thus, it can be said that Chimera It is not merely a crime story. It is a profound exploration of the power of fiction, the fragility of identity, and the necessity of storytelling to tame the ghosts of the past. Wolkenstein demonstrates that while truth may be a "daughter of time," it ultimately remains a chimeric construct. Each of the five women contributes a fragment of truth, but only through the reader's piecing together of these fragments does the complete, albeit painful, picture of liberation from toxic circumstances emerge. The novel concludes with a gesture of acceptance, while in the background, the sounds of Italo-disco drown out the melancholy of the past: "Scoppia, scoppia mi sco- / Scoppia, scoppia mi scoppia il cuor."

1. Raphaëlle Leyris, “'Chimère': comment Julie Wolkenstein on crime parfait”. Le Monde, January 10, 2026.>>>
2. Thierry Clermont, “Chimère, de Julie Wolkenstein: cinq portraits de femmes réunies autour d'un meurtre mystérieux”. Le Figaro, January 22, 2026.>>>
3. Virginie Bloch-Lainé, “Quintet pour un 'salopard'”, Libération, January 17, 2026, 38.>>>