Speech for a Friend

Friendship, mountains and books are intertwined in this exchange, with gentleness, gratitude and sorrow, to go through grief and go beyond.

“In faraway places we have shared nights with the shooting stars, we have breathed in their dust ignited by friction with the air. In sleep we have felt the turning of the constellations with the North Star fixed at the center, in roulette pegs. We snatched certain nights like this from the life of days. Distant from candles, bulbs, lighthouses and watchtowers, we have fixed in our pupils the expanse of dots of light.” 

These are pages of restrained emotion, and for that reason all the more moving and vivid, that Erri De Luca dedicates to his late friend, with whom he shared a passion for mountain climbing and experiences in the Himalayas, in Ecuador or in the Dolomites. In investigating the cause of his fall, in retracing the route where he died, searching for the precise point of his detachment from the rock, the author restores his body and voice, brings back pages from his notebooks and passages from the letters they wrote to each other, drawing a concrete and poetic picture of their bond. 

A series of photographs accompany the text.

Rights sold
France (Gallimard)
Spain (Seix Barral)