Bauby - The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor of the French fashion magazine Elle. He was well known and super successful in France. He had two lovely children and a new girlfriend. Then, at 43, he had a massive stroke that rendered him speechless and paralytic with a condition called locked-in syndrome. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the book Bauby managed to dictate through an elaborate one-letter-at-a-time blinking mechanism. He died a few days after it was published in France and the book went on to become a huge best seller.


As you might guess, the diving bell of the title refers to his paralyzed body and the butterfly to his charming and agile mind. The book itself is a series of whimsical, life-affirming musings interwoven with bits of autobiography. Of course, whimsical and life-affirming may not be your thing. I'm not sure that it is mine. 


But to me The Diving Bell and The Butterfly was fascinating for two other reasons. On the one hand, it is a record of the mind of a man in the last days of his life. A man who was forced to live entirely in his head and to effectively compose and rewrite and polish each sentence there, without the use of his body or even a pencil and paper.  On the other hand, it is really interesting to see what literary and cultural references French authors can take for granted that their French audience will be familiar with. Can English authors ever write the equivalent of "...a theatrical barrister's gesture that is pure Daumier"?


This was an interesting little book, though it didn't change my life or anything. Don't make me write anything bad about it. The poor guy blinked out the book a letter at a time and then died!