This wonderfully luminous book is a highly personal investigation into the suicide of Stefan Zweig in Petrópolis in Brazil on 23 February 1942, shortly after he visited Georges Bernanos at his farm in Barbacena. It is based on over 25 years of research, travel, and encounters, and is structured around a conversation that Sébastien Lapaque has imagined between these two giants of 20th-century literature: the godless Jew and the emancipated Catholic, the worldly but sensitive explorer of the torments of the soul and the well-grounded but rebel visionary. The contrast couldn’t be starker between the sunniness of the climes and the darkness of the times, as the Nazis lay waste to the Old Continent and fascism spreads to tropical latitudes.

Lapaque approaches the question of suicide with a bold tenacity, but also with tenderness and respect, setting it in the context of fleeing the Nazi horror, the impossibility of finding a true refuge from it, and the implacable erosion of faith in the future and desire. There is a personal but also a political dimension to this suicide. And though the dialogue imagined in Échec et mat au paradis is situated in a particular place and time, its implicit and pressing relevance to the present day will not be lost on the attentive reader. This is a fascinating political and literary tale whose poignant meditations on the temptation of despair are as gripping as a whistle-blower’s inside story.