Biography

For her first novel, Max Monnehay shines with cynicism and delicacy. In Corpus Christine, she discribes with dark humor and realism the life of a disabled and starving man, locked in his own apartment by his wife.

"All this is just a game of chess. One winner, one loser. But everyone will have lost something on the way. Pawns, bishops, little parts of us left on the sides of the game".

This game that Max Monnehay tells us is about life and death. A single game played by a narrator who has nothing left to lose. After twelve years of a happy and fulfilled mariage, everything changes when he falls off a roof. His wife, previously loving and caring, then appears in a new light and reveals her true personality. From then on, sequestered in his home and cut off from the world, the man engages in a long monologue full of rage and resentment. Throughout the pages, the story of this character emerges slowly. His past, his childhood, the entire context revealed in stages holds a breathless reader in suspense.

"You are in my world and you do nothing! Nothing. So be lenient with me as I am with you. I am shouting at you because you are poor happy little men. I am not a happy man.I am almost no longer a man ": Both desperate and combative, the narrator struggles to not give into death ... nor to his wife! Every night, to avoid his torturer, he drags his forty-five kilos out of his room in search of food. Prisoner of the slavery of a monster weighing a hundred and twenty kilos. He is balancing between love and murderous hatred for someone
he still desires.

"Corpus Christine is the testimony of a dying man who, feeling the end is near, writes to survive. In this abyss of bitterness and solitude, he engages in an inevitably tragic monologue. In this novel, Max Monnehay illustrates the eternal problem of dominant and dominated, bringing to mind the legendary Misery by Stephen King. Finally, Corpus Christine is nothing but a bloody and exacerbated painting about the reality of contemporary society." (Aneline Mennella, Marianne, 17 August 2006)