In the Land of Pain

by DAUDET, ALPHONSEBARNES, JULIAN

• ISBN13: 9780375414855
• ISBN10: 0375414851
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

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 (18401897). 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 Painnotes toward a book never writtenis 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 recordat once shattering and lighthearted, haunting and beguilingof both the banal and the transformative experience of physical suffering, and a testament to the complex resiliency of the human spirit.

Author Biography

Alphonse Daudet was born in Nîmes, France, in 1840. Novelist, playwright, and journalist, his success came through his novels and stories. He contracted syphilis at the age of seventeen and died at the age of<br>fifty-seven.<br><br>Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He is the recipient of the Prix Femina, and in 1988 was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.