La Montagne Nue

Messner exorcises his grief and puts the sequence of events into perspective: he will return alone, without his brother, from his first ascent of the Himalayas, that of the Nanga Parbat. A controversial story with unexpected twists and turns and a lot of controversy.

It took thirty years for Messner to finally deliver! To write the most intimate, most poignant of his books. Thirty years to exorcise the grief, to put the puzzle together, to reconstruct the founding drama of a whole life, "the end and the beginning of everything, the death of my brother", he writes.

Putting into perspective the implacable chain of events: how two young boys, faced with the severity of a father, come together to form an unbreakable team. How this strong bond engages them in an ideal, an expedition, the highest wall of the Himalayas, the ascent of the Nanga Parbatthe "Graal"of the Germans, the murderous mountain.

How, finally, at the age of twenty-five, Messner will come back alone, without his brother, from this climb experienced as his "impossible survival".