Book Review: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Book #75

“My cocoon becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.” — Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I’m not sure how many people haven’t heard of this book, or the movie, but here is the premise for those who haven’t: Jean-Dominique Bauby was a journalist who suffered a massive stroke. As a result of the stroke, he got a condition called locked-in syndrome, a condition where “a patient is aware and awake but cannot move or communicate verbally due to complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body except for the eyes.” (Yay Wikipedia) The book describes what he life post-stroke was like, and through his memories we look at his life pre-stroke. The book was written with Jean-Dominique and a transcriber. The transcriber would repeat a frequency-ordered alphabet and Jean-Dominique would blink to chose the next letter. The book took an estimated 200,000 blinks to write over ten months. 

I wrote this in my notebook:

I’m already on the seventh chapter of the book. It is perfectly clear it won’t take me any time at all to read it. It’s proving itself to be a beautiful read already. The thing is, every time my eye skims a word instead of reading it properly, I go back and read it again. A word so simple as ‘like’ — this took Jean-Dominique and his transcriber going through the alphabet four times to write, four blinks. Him choosing that one word takes as long as it takes me to write this entire paragraph.

The book is gorgeous. I read a review somewhere that said that when you pick this book up to read, you think the amazing thing is that he wrote it all, or the way in which he wrote it; but when you put it down you’re just in love with his prose. That’s completely true. His prose reads effortlessly, and it’s so incredibly beautiful and poignant. The wonderful thing is, he didn’t try to discount or ignore the horrible things that happened to him in his life, both pre- and post-stroke, whether they were of his own doing or others’. But he looked saw the beauty in life, as well, and I often felt like la vie en rose would have been a perfect accompanying song to the text.