The balance of the vacuum , is the journal of an anorexic whose reading involves us in a descent
into Hell. The personification of the disease occurs,all in progression at the same time as it settles
durably in the life of its young victim. The writer writes in an original style where the selected words as well as the expressions play with the topic of the food and the weight. The focus on the balance translates the aggression made with the body, on page 83 to examplify, we can read: "With the truble, I do not have only one kilo of friends! ". Or: "I have a passion for licks window. I dress as I sit at the table. Properly and rigorously. Not a stain... I am a pinch ". It is as if Nathalie Maciel, used black humour while
describing the horror she lived close to.
Black Humour is also throbbing in the deep analysis of the disease which is made through this individual history. To give you an idea of the power
of the disease on its victim the writer expresses it as follows: " It understood everything and it draws the strings of the play: it reduces us out of pulp when precisely, we do not have any more the
age to eat ! "(page 78). This sour speech, accounts for the hardness which emerges from this private diary. The victim tells how she mutilates herself without succeeding in recovering too soon.
quickly. This work is courageous. We could also qualify it visceral, so much Nathalie Maciel was not miserly with painful details. Her relation with the "Monster" that is the
anorexia, made it
possible for her to discover that it also involves the close relations of the patient in the storm
and how much they can play a part in the cure.
At the time when the skeletal models appear all over the media, this book is also a means of dissuading the girls to follow drastic modes. To also know that the discomfort should not carry them out to attack their body with the risk to sink in the rubbish of the ANOREXIA. But especially it is a cry of hope because the happy end of the intrigue is the proof
that it is possible to conquer over this morbid disease.
Dorval Editions, Collection
Harmonie de soi