The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Vintage International)
by Jean-Dominique Bauby
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jean-Dominique BaubyTranslator: Jeremy Leggatt
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-11-20
ISBN: 0007790155
Number of pages: 131
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Vintage International)
Book Review: "Are you there, Jean-Do?"
Summary: 5 Stars
Weary of the in-house feuding, preciousness, and self-absorption of so many "professional" book reviewers, I quit reading literary magazines some years ago. For the most part, I don't regret my decision. But one of its costs is that I sometimes discover gems later than I otherwise might've. One of those gems, which just came my way, is Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Bauby's memoir has so many dimensions. It's an eloquent testimony to human endurance and heroism. It's a meditation on the relationship between mind and body. It's a real-life exercise in Proustian memory. It's a heartbreaker, but it's also genuinely funny in places.
But what fascinates me most about this incredible book is Bauby's reflections on what it means to have a self. So much of who we are is wrapped up in our body-awareness (just as so much of what we think we know about others comes from our awareness of their bodies). When the body becomes a diving bell, a prison over which we have no control and to which we feel (quite literally) no connection, what does it do to our sense of personal identity? The Cartesians among us who think that we're essentially mind may not feel as if the self is compromised when the body is locked down. But Bauby (and I) doubt it. We're not disincarnate spirits. We're enfleshed creatures, and when we lose our embodiment--our ability to eat, to feel wetness or softness, to experience physical intimacy with the beloved, to "own" our bodies--we lose something essential. Acquiring "butterfly hearing" (p. 97), an enhanced sensitivity to one's memories and thoughts that allows one to temporarily transcend paralysis, is fortunate. But it is, after all, compensatory.
At one point, someone who's telephones Bauby anxiously asks him: "Are you there, Jean-Do?" Bauby's internal response: "I have to admit that at times I do not know anymore." (p. 42)
Highly recommended. Readers might also want to take a look at Richard Cohen's just-published Strong at the Broken Places: Voices of Illness, A Chorus of Hope.
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