Chloé Delaume is no ordinary fictional character. She is worse. Refusing to end her days in a book like her fellow creatures, she wandered for a long time in the limbo of Somnambulia. From there, she looked for the “mediator” in which to incarnate herself: a living body, which sinned by vacuity. Once the place has been taken over, no one will be able to dislodge it, except the body itself, if it can find enough strength or subterfuge to fight. The characters of fiction are much more malignant tumors than we think, which know how to besiege each organ with method. In order for the body to have the last word, it will have to preserve its own language, in spite of the plundering perpetrated. Through the alternating voices of the “narrative tapeworm” and the “hacked” body, La Vanité des Somnambules stages the conquest of an identity territory, the successive assaults of a cancer-nymph facing a body guilty of having used too much lie. A polyphonic fight at the borders of autofiction.