Product Description

As Julian Barnes writes in the introduction to his superb translation of Alphonse Daudet’s La Doulou, the mostly forgotten writer nowadays “ate at the top literary table” during his lifetime (1840–1897). Henry James described him as “the happiest novelist” and “the most charming story-teller” of his day. Yet if Daudet dined in the highest company, he was also “a member of a less enviable nineteenth-century French club: that of literary syphilitics.” In the Land of Pain—notes toward a book never written—is his timelessly resonant response to the disease.

In quick, sharp, unflinching strokes of his pen, Daudet wrote about his symptoms (“This is me: the one-man-band of pain”) and his treatments (“Mor-phine nights . . . thick black waves, sleepless on the surface of life, the void beneath”); about his fears and reflections (“Pain, 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 science”); his impressions of the patients, himself included, and their strange life at curative baths and spas (“Russians, both men and women, go into the baths naked . . . Alarm among the Southerners”); and about the “clever way in which death cuts us down, but makes it look like just a thinning-out.”

Given Barnes’s crystalline translation, these notes comprise a record—at once shattering and lighthearted, haunting and beguiling—of both the banal and the transformative experience of physical suffering, and a testament to the complex resiliency of the human spirit.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #410675 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-07
• Released on: 2003-01-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 112 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A popular writer in his time and admired by Charles Dickens and Henry James, French novelist, playwright and journalist Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) has been largely forgotten today. According to novelist and essayist Barnes (Something to Declare, etc.), Daudet's work, although considered charming and topical in its heyday, did not have the depth and relevance to transcend its age-with one exception, this small volume, translated into English now for the first time. Basically a loose journal of ideas, metaphors and observations, the book offers a devastating emotional and spiritual portrait of a main in profound physical pain in the tertiary stage of syphilis. Daudet continued to write and publish during his illness, though he experienced bouts of rheumatism and severe fatigue, which progressed on to debilitating "locomotor ataxia (the inability to control one's movements), and finally, paralysis." Daudet's descriptions of his physical ailment are palpably horrifying, and the feelings of isolation and inadequacy that result give readers a new understanding of the psychology of illness. Of the "sheer torture" of his pain, Daudet ultimately concludes that there are no words, "only howls." Words, he says, "only come when everything is over.... They refer only to memory, and are either powerless or untruthful." However inadequate the author may believe his words to have been, the indomitable spirit of life that is conveyed on every one of these pages is Daudet's ultimate triumph. 4 illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker
Syphilis may lack something of the romantic aura surrounding tuberculosis in literary history, but it was the illness of choice for the French nineteenth century: Flaubert, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Maupassant all suffered from it. Daudet, best known for his light, charming stories of southern France (Barnes judges him a tie for fourth-most important syphilitic), died of it, in 1897. These are his notes from underground. They include a narrative of his treatments (in which the author is hung in the air by the jaw and injected with a solution extracted from guinea pigs), ruminations on fear and fraud, and sharp observations of the healthy. But much of the book—and the book's force—lies in the patient's flailing search for a language to match his suffering. "Tonight, pain in the form of an impish little bird hopping hither and thither," he writes. "The only part of me that's alive is my pain."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist
Acclaimed novelist Barnes describes French writer Daudet (1840-97) as having been "substantially forgotten," but in his day, Daudet counted among his circle Flaubert, Dickens, James, Zola, Turgenev, and the Goncourt brothers, and was widely admired as a "sunny humorist and clear stylist." He was also one of the "literary syphilitics," stricken with a form called tabes dorsalis, a horrifically painful affliction that impaired motion and eventually brought on paralysis. A generous and philosophical man, Daudet faced his ever-increasing pain and debility with remarkable courage and kindness to others. Grateful to remain sound of mind, he found some comfort in writing about his struggle, making the keenly observant and vital notes that comprise this remarkable, impressionistic, and life-affirming memoir. Daudet's gifts for vivid description, sharp humor, penetrating reflection, and lithe storytelling were irrepressible, and his account of his derailed life from "the day Pain entered" onward, a text rediscovered and superbly translated by Barnes, is deeply affecting testimony to the radiance of the soul even as the body turns to "stone which feels pain." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Riveting Literary Analysis of Chronic Physical Pain
I became interested in this short book because I admired Julian Barnes' earlier work ("Flaubert's Parrot", "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters") and because of my own pain. I have neuropathy (nerve damage) in my hands, legs, and feet because of diabetes. Although my situation is not as dire as Alphonse Daudet's, I found myself nodding my head over and over at the accuracy of his perceptions. Daudet had ataxia: pain and progressive paralysis due to end-stage syphilis. He was a very popular comic writer in his day (the French late 19th century) but has been mostly forgotten except for this little book, which Barnes translated into English for the first time. Barnes also provides excellent commentary. This book combines lightness and literary weight in perfect proportion.

Daudet's weapon in his decade long struggle with his pain were his notebooks, which were filled with precise description and irony. (He finally died at age 57.) This sounds like a recipe for self-absorption, but there is very little ego in this book. Daudet approached his pain almost as a puzzle to be solved, not as an invitation for people to feel sorry for him. Barnes provides descriptions of Daudet's gallant response to his illness. Barnes quotes Philip Larkin: "courage is not frightening the others" and Daudet seems to have believed that as well. He was haunted by the thought of burdening his devoted wife and children, but agrees that his family responsibilities actually help him cope.

The effort of writing seems to have been cathartic for Daudet, and the reader is filled with a similar feeling of cheerfulness at having faced things squarely. Daudet had little use for religion: but at one point he admits that most people are not made happy by either good fortune or good health. He sighs, "all we lack is a sense of the divine." He carried on anyway, and this small, grim book may also help you too, in a way more sentimental books can't

Insightful, poetic view of pain, death and graciousness
Third stage syphilis is an unlikely subject for an enchanting book - but this it is. First, one is impressed by the precision of observation and expression. While the symptoms are shared with other patients, this is always the description of a particular victim of the disease. Second, one is impressed by the ever-changing attitude of Daudet to the progression and feared progression of the diease. Third, one is impressed by Daudet himself in his concern for those around him. The result is an enjoyable, informative introduction to Daudet as a person and as an example of human response to continuous pain.

Julian Barnes' translation is excellent - footnotes are provided that identify people, places, medicines that are unfamilar. Two short essays on Daudet and syphlis complete the book.

While this book may not appear to be high on the to-be-read-list, it deserves a place near the top.

"My Anguish Is Great, and I Weep As I Write"
Books about pain can be excruciating to read, and this is one of them. It is fragmentary, brutally honest, and as direct as an uppercut to the jaw.

Other works in the same genre include Montaigne's long essay "Of Experience" and Tolstoy's novelette THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH. Somehow we would all like to think that we will escape pain and die softly like a snowflake evaporating in pure air. If we were all Zen masters, we could die like the sages in Yoel Hoffmann's brilliant collection, JAPANESE DEATH POEMS:

Inhale, exhale
Forward, back
Living, dying:
Arrows, let flown each to each
Meet midway and slice
The void in aimless flight --
Thus I return to the source.
-- Gesshu Soko (d. 1696)

Though not well known to English-speaking readers, Alphone Daudet was considered one of the greatest French novelists of the late 19th century. A full forty years before his death, he contracted syphilis around the age of 17. Around the age of 40, Daudet's illness reached the tertiary stage; and he was bedeviled by a symphony of pain that attacked his various organs, sometimes with brief remissions before new and more awful symptoms appeared.

It is ironical that, were he alive today, Daudet would be cured by antibiotics; and Montaigne's kidney stones, possibly by medications, possibly by a routine surgery.

British novelist Julian Barnes edited this collection of fragments. It takes only a couple of hours to read, but I guarantee that this book will leave echoes in your mind about the battles you yourself may face as you reach the endgame.