the diving bell and the butterfly book online

My imagination and my memory“įootnote: Although I have only just read Bauby’s book The Diving-bell and the Butterfly I did also see the film made by artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel several years ago. “Other than my eye, two things aren’t paralyzed. But Jean-Dominique Bauby’s book does throw it into a different perspective and one that does bring a feeling of wonder for one man’s inner spirit and inner world. Times are indeed difficult and challenging. We are all feeling restricted, like the world as it was, is passing us by. Whilst reading it isn’t long before you started to see the connections with the world as we are experiencing it now. No, what comes out of this short one-hundred page book is a writer who seems to want to share, to maybe open our eyes a little more and to still feel part of a world that is in so many ways cut off from him.

Throughout there is little evidence of a voice that is expressing regret, rage, or frustration, although all of those emotions must surely have been experienced. He takes the reader away on memories of holidays past, dictating them to us the reader just as he has explored them for himself time and again confined in his prison-like body. He discusses the simplest things, such as not being able to run his fingers through his son’s hair, to amusing stories from his past as an editor in chief of the French edition of Elle magazine.

It seems an almost superhuman achievement to explore and reflect on his life and his future when all his faculties to communicate have been closed down by his injury. This should, you would think, be a challenging and heavy read, and yet it is anything but that.īauby displays an ability to see so far beyond his hospital bed plight. But as you read on you are drawn into Jean-Dominique’s world, his past, his family and friends as well as the interactions with his carers. The sudden and completely unexpected brain injury the writer suffered that left him bed-ridden is both shocking and confrontational to read about in someone so young.

The diving bell and the butterfly book online