Sur la corde opens in Moselle, Lorraine. Dante, an eccentric writer who is unsatisfied with his existence, meets Vladimir by a story night; it is the beginning of a strange friendship. Vladimir the vagabond, the wild child, is a professional climber: his job fixes him up to the rooftops, from which he dangles by a rope. Fascinated, Dante asks to be initiated into this trade. His life is radically disrupted. He leaves his family home to go live with his new friend, first in the country, then in Paris. Training in this new discipline bestows upon Dante an energy he never knew he had, and his body unveils the will for power that he had believed literature promised him. His entire worldview shifts. Perched on the roofs of factories, clinging to the sides of miserable flats, suspended from the heights of the Eiffel Tower or luxurious Parisian hotels, Dante exults in his new life. In an incessant quest for the summit, with nothing more than a bit of rope for support, his life is permanently at risk. The self-interrogation is radical. From a passive intellectual, he is transformed into a man of action. But the metamorphosis is brutal. India becomes his escape route. South of Calcutta, he meets a woman who teaches him the art of self-abandonment. Soon after, a wordless idyll in which pleasure replaces speech words springs up between them. He returns to France enriched with this mystery. Back in Paris, Vladimir and he start a worksite that will be Dante’s last. The fall, impromptu, stupid, brings his quest to a close. Lying broken and damaged on the ground, he must find the strength to raise himself up through his spirit. This final ascension towards the light is the one that was missing. With this text and its sometimes brutal, but always inspired language, Frédéric Galante bids us to reflect on the connection between the darkness of the aimless life of a young man of 23 and the light acquired through physical effort and the redemption of love. Sur la corde is an intoxicating search for enlightenment, in which a human being can find a reason for existing and the means to endlessly reinvent himself incessantly, at the crossroad between horizontality and verticality.