Poet-I-Am's review
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Poet-I-Am's review
rating:
bookshelves: authors, autobiography, french, illness, journalism, literature, magazine, memoir, overcoming, paralysis, strokes, terminal, the, trauma, twentieth, writing
rating:
bookshelves: authors, autobiography, french, illness, journalism, literature, magazine, memoir, overcoming, paralysis, strokes, terminal, the, trauma, twentieth, writing
A Small Book with a Big Soul
Jean-Dominique Bauby's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a small book composed of many big wonders. Primary among this book's extraordinary qualities is the fact that Bauby, a former editor in chief of the world-famous French Elle, was able to "write" it at all. after suffering a stroke to his brain stem and spending 20 days in a coma, Bauby regained command of a nearly clairvoyant intellect but lost all authority over his body. The sole physical function he retained was the ability to blink his left eye; by use of it, he developed a kind of sign language that allowed him to dictate letter by painstaking letter the brief and luminous chapters that make up "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."
Anyone could easily have forgiven bauby had he chosen to lapse into the kind of rage and unhinged sentimentality that characterize (although justifiably so) other memoirs based on extreme medical situations. However, he t...more
Jean-Dominique Bauby's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a small book composed of many big wonders. Primary among this book's extraordinary qualities is the fact that Bauby, a former editor in chief of the world-famous French Elle, was able to "write" it at all. after suffering a stroke to his brain stem and spending 20 days in a coma, Bauby regained command of a nearly clairvoyant intellect but lost all authority over his body. The sole physical function he retained was the ability to blink his left eye; by use of it, he developed a kind of sign language that allowed him to dictate letter by painstaking letter the brief and luminous chapters that make up "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."
Anyone could easily have forgiven bauby had he chosen to lapse into the kind of rage and unhinged sentimentality that characterize (although justifiably so) other memoirs based on extreme medical situations. However, he t...more
I urge you to read and explore my additional posting today about the Julian Schnabel film which appears to have captured the very soul you recognized in the book. I have pasted in the links. I am giddy with excitement about this visual recreation of what we both recognized as a classic.
