“Solal or the Fall of Bodies” by Louis Vendel: a story of friendship

2024-01-12 14:35:22

Solal or the fall of bodies

by Louis Vendel

Threshold, 304 p., €20

Founder of several literary media, including the Zola LetterLouis Vendel is sensitive to true stories. “Storytelling reality is an enterprise that fascinates me, I cannot say for what reasons. » No wonder, then, that Solal or the fall of bodieshis first book, is dedicated to one of his closest friends.

The author met Solal when they were 20, at the end of summer on a Parisian terrace. He remembers finding it « bizarre ». Very quickly, the two young men become close. Solal was diagnosed with bipolar type 2. He oscillates between hypomanic phases, in which “he doesn’t care about social conventions”and low phases, where it looks like a ” fat cat “as his mother says.

After asking Solal for his agreement for the book (“it was hot”), Louis Vendel asks a thousand questions to his friend, his family, his loved ones, psychiatrists, to better understand the disorder. Over the course of the project, it even becomes for Solal “the arbiter of his memories”correcting him on his own dates.

Little piece of absolute love

The story reads like a novel. The reader follows the high phases of Solal during which “he doesn’t live in the present” more “pursues him like a chimera” ; his endangerment, up to a five-meter fall where he came close to death during a stay in the Canary Islands; his constant questions about his future up to his unique idea of ​​traveling around the world on foot. During these hours of walking, “sorrow comes easily to him”. “It’s a fatigue in the eyes, a loss of strength in the fists, like an irrepressible desire to escape from one’s own body”.

Several times, the author questions himself. Why is his friend “on the side of the crazy” and him “on the healthy side” ? Where is the ” border “ in between “his madness and ours” ? “There are no more uncontrollable thoughts in him. Only a latent discomfort, which no state of consciousness can completely erase. A form of stubborn inability to inhabit the world as it is and which, in the face of many happy events, sometimes gives him an absent appearance. A melancholy that does not speak its name. But are we very different from him? »

Above all, Louis Vendel praises “true friendship” which unites them, resembling a “little piece of absolute love”. He knows it: there will be other ups and other downs. “Solal, you are a cloud, you let the winds carry you around too easily. »