[YpbWF5Yo]

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Le Scaphandre et le Papillon
Jean-Dominique Bauby (trans: Jeremy Leggatt)

It is hard to believe that something so utterly horrific could result in something as beautiful as this small memoir. Once an editor of the style magazine Elle, Jean-Dominique Bauby was in the prime of his life when a devastating stroke put him in a twenty-day coma, from which he "recovered" to find himself trapped within his own body, having no more control over it than to blink one eyelid. With only this (and the painstaking attention of Claude Mendibil, a freelance editor to whom the book is jointly dedicated) at his disposal, Bauby endeavored to communicate his thoughts and feelings with an eloquence now physically denied him; these are the butterflies within his diving bell.

Prior to his crippling attack, Bauby was by all accounts a man of wit, charm and creativity and there is nothing in his book to dispute it. Each chapter is as slight as the pages they are printed on but they convey a solidity of experience, conjuring up memories sometimes painful but always cherished, the base traumas his life has been reduced to, dreams, nightmares and the small pleasures he can still find in the world "outside". He finds humour and irony in his situation, and even manages to forgive the people who must take care of him when they could be enjoying their own lives of a Sunday.

Of course, it's tragic. Terrifying even, in the mundanities he describes in the lead up to his downfall, the total lack of warning before his effective life was stolen from him. It's inspiring too, how he is able to come to terms with his plight, maintain relationships with friends and family and, of course, manage to write the memoir at all. Conceiving each chapter, memorising word for word what he wanted to say, then dictating by necessity in the most laborious manner over a period of months; one need not even read the thing to be impressed beyond measure. The text produced is simple but vivid, funny and moving and insightful and hard to talk about clinically.

Bauby died of pneumonia two days after his book was published. It's an incredible sadness that someone would have to endure so much to be able to provide everyone else with so moving a story.

[Unhappu]

I just discovered they made a movie from it,with a bit more of his life before.It seem interesting and i'm certain quiet certain different from the book.Simply because of the impossibelity to express the closeness the book create with the reader.
A very good review Catch22,there very little to add or maybe just a warning about the effect the book must have on everyone.It's not leaving you when you put it done,and will along stay for a while.

[YpbWF5Yo]

Thanks - and I've heard very good things about the film too, although I've not seen it as yet.

[lidya-sggf]

Just to basically agree with Catch22:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby

It's a short book. Just 138 pages, with few chapters longer than 3-4 pages at most. You might be forgiven for thinking that it's typical of a journalist (Bauby was the editor-in-chief of Elle) used to writing short, snappy articles.

If you didn't know that he wrote the book with his left eye.

It's called locked-in syndrome. One day just like any other, a blood vessel bursts in Bauby's head. When he wakes up, his intellect is still perfectly intact, but his body is almost completely paralyzed. He can move his head slightly, he can blink his left eye, and that's about it. So he writes the book about his experience the only way he can: an assistant reads the alphabet (reordered by how common each letter is in the French language) out loud, and when she gets to the right letter, Bauby blinks.

E S A R I N T U L O M D P C F B V H G J -

*blink*

J?

J.

E -

*blink*

E?

E.

"Je" ("I")? OK, next word.

And so on and so forth, letter by letter.

You'd think he had something very important to tell the world to make that effort. And in a sense I suppose he does. Between the descriptions of his day-to-day "life" at the hospital, he weaves in fantasies of what he'd do if he could, places he'd travel and now has to settle for imagining, the people he knew and still knows, women he's loved, his children... Trying to conjure up and record memories of a life he now realises he will never return to, and which he can feel slipping away with every passing day. He's got so much he wants to say and feel and tell the world, and he has to break out of the prison his body has become in any way possible.

This is a shattering, if slightly uncomfortable read. There's an undertone of both horror, wonder and bitterness (and if anyone ever earned the right to be bitter...), mixed up with a gallow's humour that sometimes chokes on its own laughter. It's a man who still really wants to live, a voracious mind in a dead body, refusing to go gently into that good night - at least not without first putting down on paper that he was here, that he still is, that life is important even if it can suck beyond the telling of it.

He died 3 days after the book was published.