Leaving the shores of orderly life
Éric Bellion, Stock, 350 pages, 22 euros. (Credits: LTD)
Éric is a boy like the others, a pure product of a category called CSP+, childhood in Versailles, a good high school, a management school, all the codes to make your way without too many qualms in the world of company, at the turn of the 2000s. It rubs shoulders with the commonplaces of this type of education: the sense of effort, of always doing better, which sometimes borders on contempt for suffering, this permanent dissatisfaction which is supposed to guarantee a plan career. How can we explain that we find the same Eric, twenty-five years later, on the verge of a second Vendée Globe after he has crisscrossed the seas, from improbable projects to crazy initiatives?
Certainly a family imprint of open-mindedness, of empathy tinged with altruism has shaped the young man. The secret hurt of having seen his stuttering father fight all his life inevitably made him reflect on these fates suffered and on the fragility that we all share, without sometimes knowing it. But all this does not explain it. It took another spark, another ambition, another dream to leave the shores of ordered life towards uncertain ramblings.
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Where does this intoxication of walking on a wire come from? To push yourself to exist at the limits of your physical and mental resistance? To feel dispossessed as soon as the adventure ends and to always want to restart a project as if the ball were never to hit the ground? Not all the children who discovered sailing and read the exploits of Bernard Moitessier entered the Vendée Globe, and especially not twice.
The road trip happened at the age of 24, but I bet that it had haunted him for a long time, producing nights of dilemma, and if the strange idea of his friend Brice hit the mark so quickly, it was because the terrain was favorable . The idea of crossing even just the harbor of Brest on the Kifouinethis boat on which the three of them are going to sail around the world, would have put off many sailors. But in the end, it will not only be a maritime epic like young people can experience before finding the right path to social integration, but a real departure in the form of a revelation.
Éric Bellion sailed aboard Stand as One, his 2024 Vendée Globe sailboat. (Credits: LTD/PASCAL HUIT/PRESSE SPORTS)
The side road filled him, the shock of the beauty of the waves and the sky, the exhilaration of the determination to make a way to leave, to lead this so small boat, the warm humanity of a crew, but also damage, renunciations, crises. All these emotions kept him weightless and permanently away from routines.
Returning from this experience, how can we continue, around the values of inclusion, humanism and ecology? It will be with Jolokiaa navigation record between France and Mauritius with a crew including disabled people. The name of this powerful pepper foreshadows, without him suspecting it at first, financial, technical and above all human difficulties. The arrival in Port Louis is marked by a joyless celebration. All the efforts and good feelings were shattered against the reality of individualism and team management.
Never mind, little Eric had learned to persevere even if it meant continuing to hurt himself. It will be Team Jolokia: training a motley crew of experienced people in ocean racing, in the physical, social and generational sense. Once again, altruism gets bogged down, our hero throws in the towel after a few months. Since band leader doesn't suit him, he might as well try alone, and with fanfare, please: the Vendée Globe. This race that he will finish as first rookie will be above all an almost mystical experience, where nature and inexperience push him to the limit. He screams, he cries, he fights. Shouldn't we stop making ourselves suffer?
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The time of remission comes: love, fatherhood, a pleasure sailboat for a deep-sea trip should bring him the slow wisdom of happy people. Wasted effort! There he is, stamping his feet again, lacking exploits, exultation, exhaustion of the senses and the will. A second Vendée Globe?
Between solitude and group life, between wild life and the communication society, between appeasement and exacerbation, from successes to disappointments, chasing an indefinable absolute, Éric is indeed “in search of balance”, ultimately like many of us . Not sure that this second world tour will bring him real answers, but he has the hope and the courage to try. Perhaps the wave and the star tattooed on his arm will teach him that the search for balance is simply life.
The Holy Grail of skippers
The incredible stories of the Vendée Globe, Dino Di Meo, Hugo Sport, 220 pages, 19.90 euros. (Credits: LTD)
Did you know that Éric Coquerel was passionate about the Vendée Globe? Working with Isabelle Autissier, Michel Desjoyeaux and the French Sailing Federation, the LFI deputy for Seine-Saint-Denis has long had the taste of salt in his mouth, like all the protagonists of Dino Di Meo's captivating book . The journalist tells us thirty-five years of incredible stories of this solo, non-stop and unassisted world tour. It describes the evolution of boats, communication and safety measures, particularly after the death of Canadian skipper Gerry Roufs in 1997. We see how the sea wolves gradually gave way to sailboat engineers followed by teams worthy of F1 teams.
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The story of Yann Eliès in 2008 is undoubtedly the most memorable: leaving to replace a piece of rope at the front of his boat, he suffered a shock which broke his leg. With his limb dislocated, he managed to hoist himself onto the deck. Lying on his back, he screams in rage, thinking he will soon die. He crawls 15 meters and must choose: have access to the telephone or medication. He calls the race doctor, who diagnoses a fractured femur, an absolute emergency. A time trial, which we follow nervously, then begins to save the young 34-year-old sailor. His Dantesque rescue does not inoculate him against the race: he wants to start again. The following summer, he took the start of the Solitaire du Figaro while he was still walking on crutches, and he left for the Vendée globe in 2016, taking 5th place.
Don't think women are left out. The incredible Ellen MacArthur gives us a lesson in passion: in 2001, at the age of 24, she finished 2nd behind Michel Desjoyeaux. On arrival, not resigning herself to getting off her boat, she declared: “ It's everything I imagined, the great mountains of the South Seas, the moon, the storms, the icebergs… It was the goal of my life. Everything I've done up to that point was for that. »
How to say goodbye
How I Die, by Peter Schjeldahl, translated from English (United States) by Nicolas Chemla, Séguier, 144 pages, 13.90 euros. (Credits: LTD)
One day in the fall of 2021, while he was driving his beautiful, brand-new Subaru to his country estate in the Catskill Mountains from New York, the great art critic of New Yorker a youNew York Times Peter Schjeldahl, 77, receives
a phone call from his doctor. He then tells him that, suffering from lung cancer (three packs of cigarettes a day since adolescence, it's true…), he only has six months to live.
Some would have been distressed, revolted or terrified. Not Schjeldahl. Far from abandoning himself to any “de profundis” whatsoever, which the circumstances would nevertheless authorize, he chooses to remain resolutely on the side of joy, perceiving no scandal in the fate that awaits him. So, to his daughter who asks about the trip he might want to take during these weeks of relative respite, Rome or Paris, he replies: rather a baseball game, the Mets against the Braves at Citi Field Stadium…
A poet in his lost moments of youth, Schjeldahl also undertakes to take up his pen again for a sort of truant tale mixing with crazy freedom Memories, confessions, reflections… Without illusions ( “Memory lies to us. It's nothing but a pile of dog-eared, garbled fiction, full of stains and fingerprints, and constantly retouched.), without ever cheating with its truth. It is this story which reaches us today, two years after the death of its author, under the title of Comment
I die. It is a joy of humor, of lively intelligence, of stoicism which does not make a spectacle of itself. This discourse on the method of knowing how to die is obviously above all a treatise on knowing how to live.
Song of the forgotten
Promised Lands, by Bénédicte Dupré La Tour, Les Éditions du Panseur, 320 pages, 22 euros. (Credits: LTD)
Tragic refrain where human filth teems, ” sick of his spirit of conquest and
of dispossession”, Promised Lands delivers in reverse the epic of a convoy of Anglo-Saxon pioneers, led by an Irish reverend, who leaves Europe in the hope of building a better world on the New Continent. The seven characters, sadly linked as in a marabout song, will crash into the chimera of colonization. They kill, are killed, avoid each other. This novel–rosary reverses the perspective to bring out, through the vibrant contrast of elegiac prose, the savagery of a so-called civilized world which claimed to evangelize barbaric lands.
Blocked in the mountains by winter, the pioneers are forced to cut shreds of flesh from their dead to feed on, indulging in this gesture in cannibalism which, in their representation of these so-called savages, they attribute to the natives, figures of the absolute other. Among the latter, conversely, the word “love” does not exist, replaced by a whispered melody, since “Words are too narrow to contain love”…
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The events are recounted several times, from the inside and the outside. Kinta, an Indian from the highlands, is born while giving birth, nourishes herself with the pleasure of feeding her son. If she bites her husband, it is to protect herself against his violent attacks. Is it because she saw her parents feed on the deceased so as not to die of hunger? Mary, on the contrary, who is one of the colonists, seems to want to devour Eliott, her son, to feed on him. She bites it to feast on it, in a deadly impulse, like
if he was still inside her.
Men trade in women, “do their needs” in their bellies; of the “exhausted gold miners turn over the riverbeds”, hoping to find nuggets of gold there. The colonists wanted to reinvent themselves on these “extenses as vast as the sky
and still virgin of all sin. They only sow seeds« croupissure » without seeing that
“the human plague [est] in their luggage. As a promised land, a carnal, relentless rewriting of the American myth hits us in the face.
