In the Land of Pain Book

As Julian Barnes writes in the introduction to his superb translation of Alphonse Daudetâ??s La Doulou, the mostly forgotten writer nowadays â??ate at the top literary tableâ? during his lifetime (1840â??1897). Henry James described him as â??the happiest novelistâ? and â??the most charming story-tellerâ? of his day. Yet if Daudet dined in the highest company, he was also â??a member of a less enviable nineteenth-century French club: that of literary syphilitics.â? In the Land of Painâ??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??This is me: the one-man-band of painâ?) and his treatments (â??Mor-phine nights . . . thick black waves, sleepless on the surface of life, the void beneathâ?); about his fears and reflections (â??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 scienceâ?); his impressions of the patients, himself included, and their strange life at curative baths and spas (â??Russians, both men and women, go into the baths naked . . . Alarm among the Southernersâ?); and about the â??clever 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.Read More