Alphonse Daudet,Julian Barnes
As Julian Barnes writes in the introduction to his superb translation of Alphonse Daudetâ€™s La Doulou, the mostly forgotten writer nowadays â€œate at the top literary tableâ€ during his lifetime (1840â€“1897). Henry James described him as â€œthe happiest novelistâ€ and â€œthe most charming story-tellerâ€ of his day. Yet if Daudet dined in the highest company, he was also â€œa member of a less enviable nineteenth-century French club: that of literary syphilitics.â€, In the Land of Pain,â€”notes toward a book never writtenâ€”is his timelessly resonant response to the disease. ,In quick, sharp, unflinching strokes of his pen, Daudet wrote about his symptoms (â€œThis is me: the one-man-band of painâ€) and his treatments (â€œMor-phine nights . . . thick black waves, sleepless on the surface of life, the void beneathâ€); about his fears and reflections (â€œPain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit. Be my philosophy, be my scienceâ€); his impressions of the patients, himself included, and their strange life at curative baths and spas (â€œRussians, both men and women, go into the baths naked . . . Alarm among the Southernersâ€); and about the â€œclever way in which death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out.â€,Given Barnesâ€™s crystalline translation, these notes comprise a recordâ€”at once shattering and lighthearted, haunting and beguilingâ€”of both the banal and the transformative experience of physical suffering, and a testament to the complex resiliency of the human spirit.
Autobiography,Memoir,Nonfiction,Biography,Cultural,France,Biography,Autobiography,Literature,19th Century,Classics,European Literature,French Literature,Health,Illness,History
In the Land of Pain