The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

This is a great book, Very deserving the praise you will find on cover from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Financial Times lauding the book as one of the best books in a hundred year. The The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a gripping, heart-wrenching, tautly poetic prose, which you picked and really can’t put down. The story, if you can call it that, as it is not a straight narrative, is told in vignettes. I read it in a weekend, and mostly in one sitting. You don’t want to put in down, because it goes down so easily, but also because it is so sad that you don’t to carry that feeling with you for a long time.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells a true of an editor of Elle Magazine in Paris who has a stroke, which in a previous day would have surely left him for dead, but now days he is has a condition known as Locked-In syndrome. He communicates through blinking one eye. He composes the book by someone going through the alphabet until Bauby indicates which the right letter is by blinking. What you get is an internal world of person who is alert but has lost all functionality with his body, hence losing his ability to communicate to the outside world. His mind stays active. In his prose is the world of a man in complete solitude. His sentences are perfect pithily prose, but you also get a sense how much time he has spent inside his own head.

He describes his situation of having no control over his situation without frustration. I don’t know of any other record of someone in his condition.

If you have ever worked or volunteered in a hospital with a population with severe neurological trauma, you know that these people exist. They lay there alone or piled next to each other like a Victorian asylum to human misery; not quite alive and not quite dead.

The courageous part is that this man never lost his consciousness of everything and his spirit remaines strong; grasping on to life where ever he can get it. But you know he is going die. In his memories, he romantically shares the memories of his life; it’s tragic that a life could boil down to a few precious moments.

He knows he is dying. He doesn’t die in the book, but it is written on the cover that he dies a couple days after its French publication.

The book was a huge success internationally. It has been made into a movie that is out now, and is suppose to be very good. I am not sure if I am going to see it. I am still touched and sadden by the story. I am not sure if I want to go through that again.