According to the Law: Four Accounts of Mankind — Solvej Balle

Nicholas S., a biochemist in Quebec, is close to bringing the human race to solving the great enigma of man's upright posture. As his story opens, he is on the way to collect the corpse of a young woman who has died from hypothermia and bequeathed her body to scientific research.
What Tanja L. wants to discover is the nature of pain. She is conscious of inflicting pain on others - men crumple and drop dead in the street on sight of her; and she can come to terms with her power only by discovering exactly what pain is made of. There is no doubt that pain exists but who knows what it is? Her quest leads her first to Barcelona...
Rene G., a Danish mathematician has one consuming ambition: to take up the absolute minimum of space that it is possible for any one human to take up on the map of humanity. How close will he come to turning himself into a non-entity - a pane of glass, a passing breeze - while still inhabiting his body? One day in a cafe in Basle his eye falls on a young woman in a black dress...
Alette V. is an artist in Quebec who specialises in portrait busts, capturing people's likenesses in plaster - or in bronze. She likes inert matter more than she likes mankind. Indeed her concern is with her own ultimate passing from human being to thing, on the same scale of inanimate objectivity as a chair - or a corpse.
What these four short tales have in common is that they are about people obsessively dedicated to their own particular search, people on the verge of a great discovery about the nature of being. And the basis of their searches is a total rejection of all preconceptions, which enables them to see the ordinary and everyday from a totally novel angle. In According to the Law Solvej Balle reveals an unsettling vision and a startlingly original talent.