It seems both a great compliment to read a book all in one sitting, and a little disrespectful. But it is wonderfully satisfying, and it is exactly what I did this week with Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butteryfly, a book more painstakingly constructed than most.


It tells the true story of its author, Bauby, the editor of Elle magazine, who suffers a stroke and as a result suffers locked-in syndrome. He is unable to move at all, except for having slight movement in his neck and being able to blink his left eye. And so he dictates the book one letter at a time, with his assistant reciting a specially organised alphabet so that he can blink when she reaches the right letter. This is not a man who is going to mince his words. The result is a beautiful, honest, mournful book about that it means to be human.



I went online and bought immediately after watching the French film of the same title, which is also a masterpiece. It attempts to explore how the world feels for Bauby, and so forces us to identify with him fully. The director Julian Schnabel is not afraid to subject the viewers to blurry vision, odd angles, extended shots of a diver submerged underwater in a diving bell, and long sequences of letters being painstakingly repeated aloud. The first time we see Bauby’s face is the moment that he himself does, by which point we have seen several flash-backs of him in his prime. The repulsion and sympathy that the moment provokes are powerful.


However, the film also takes full artistic license in re-creating some of Bauby’s fantasies. Several appear in the book, in a tone trapped between frank abandon and painful embarrassment. In the film they are colourful, and flit around as his “mind takes flight like a butterfly”.

 
What I found perhaps most uncomfortable but also the most comforting about both the book and the film is that whilst being utterly heart-wrenching, Bauby never descends into self pity. Indeed, at times it seems almost appropriate to laugh. I suppressed a snort when the hospital porter turns the TV off when Bauby is half-way through watching the football. The book includes more moments like this where comedy and tragedy touch: “I still want to be myself. If I must drool, I may as well drool on cashmere.”

 
Bauby allows us our entertainment, writing: “There comes a time when the heaping-up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter”. Which is why this is a book to both laugh and cry at.

 


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