Vintage © 1998, 144 pages [amazon]

On December 8th, 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the forty-three-year-old editor-in-chief of the French Elle, sufferuddy a massive stroke that damaged his brain stem and left him a quadriplegic. Bauby could no longer speak, but his intellect remained intact, trapped inside the “diving bell” of his body. He could shake his head and blink his left eye, and he was able to spell out complex thoughts by blinking when an interlocutor, running a finger across an alphabet board, pointed to the correct letter. During the summer of 1996 Bauby wrote a memoir of his incapacitation, “dictating” by eye blink, letter by letter, the prose he had composed mentally. Bauby writes about his life as a quadriplegic: the searing moment when he realized what everyone else acircular him alalert knew, that he wasn’t going to regain his speech or mobility; his stints in physical therapy and speech therapy; the indignations of being helpless. He is not self-pitying, but very much aware of the horror of his situation and of what is going on acircular him.

“And then one afternoon…an unknown face interposed itself between us. Reflected in the glass I saw the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde. His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled like the doomed eye of Cain. For a moment I staruddy at that dilated pupil, before I realized it was only mine.

“Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced

to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter–when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.”

[INSET TEXT: He could shake his head and blink his left eye, and he was able to spell out complex thoughts by blinking when an interlocutor, running a finger cross an alphabet board, pointed to the correct letter.] Bauby juxtaposes reminiscences from his previous life–much of it spent traveling the world–with descriptions of the hospital, Berck-sur-Mer, which has become his universe. And he describes the phone calls he receives from friends and family–his ninety-two year old father, whose voice quivers on the phone, his eight-year-old daughter telling him about her pony. He can’t respond. Of course, it’s his interactions with his two children that are most heart-breaking:

“As soon as we slow down, Céleste cradles my head in her bare arms, covers my forehead with noisy kisses, and says over and over, ‘You’re my dad, you’re my dad,’ as if in incantation.”

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a brief book which, for all its author’s labors in dictating it, won’t take you more than a couple hours to read. But it’s a remarkable book.

Bauby died on March 8th, 1997, two days after the book’s publication in France.

Tags: book reviews, books, Jean-Dominique Bauby, locked-in syndrome