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 Jean-Dominique Bauby was an active, robust family man and editor of French Elle when at the age of forty-three he was brought low by a rare stroke of the brain stem. After his stroke, he remained in a coma for months, and when he woke he suffered from locked in syndrome. This is a condition when a person’s thought processes are still intact and fully functioning, but his or her body is unable to communicate those thoughts. In Bauby’s case, he could still blink an eyelid to share his thoughts, but to be honest, that’s close enough. Before his death, Bauby dictated this, his memoir, letter by letter with blinks.
This is a heartbreaking book and I don’t know how to review it. It can’t really be a review, because how can you review such a thing? It’s impossible not to feel for this man who had his life stolen from him so dramatically and so quickly. He describes how, just before his accident, he was caring for his elderly father, who could no longer leave his flat, comparing how he was being shaved to the way he shaved his father. They both expected the elder man to die first – neither realised then just how fragile life could be.
Bauby distills his life into a series of minutiae that none of us ever think of; how happy he’d be if he could just swallow his saliva or be able to tell whether his limbs are hot or cold. The huge effect that an indifferent nurse can have – whether they’ll ignore his frantic eyeblinks or try to work out what he wants, whether it’s just the television on or a more serious problem. The last day of his normal life has taken on a surreal significance, of course; he takes us through it step by step.
What I think amazed me most about the book was that he maintained his good humor, his compassion, and all the best of his human spirit. He’s understandably a little bitter, but he never turns the memoir into an outlet for complaints; all of his observations are tinged with humor. Most of all what struck me was his determined efforts to get better. It seems that brain stems do occasionally heal, but do so at a snail’s pace. He was working on making noises with his mouth again. Devastatingly, the poor man died two days after this book was published, and all his goals herein left me with a sense of both sadness and wonder, that a man so betrayed by his own body could continue to hope that it would serve him well again one day.
If nothing else, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly will leave you with a lasting appreciation for your own life, for your ability to speak and walk and laugh. I can’t imagine how heartless you’d have to be to walk out on a frantically blinking patient after reading this book – I’m not a nurse and wouldn’t like to be, but even so it made me think about how I treat others and how I’d like to be treated. This is such a worthy, if sad, book, which should be read by all.
I am an Amazon Associate. I purchased this book.
 Georgina Jackson is a serious, literary writer – which is her world means she’s writing quality stuff, but sales are low and people are uninterested. Though her first novel was a success by those standards, she’s struggling with book number two and has no idea whether she’ll be able to stay in her beloved England after her research money runs out. So when her agent pitches her as the ideal writer to complete a Jane Austen book based on a single chapter, Georgina knows she can’t do it – especially because she hasn’t ever read a single book by Jane Austen – but she capitulates anyway because she desperately needs the money.
I liked a lot of things about this book. For one thing, I can completely understand an American in love with England, especially London. I’m a ridiculous Anglophile myself and I could completely identify with Georgina’s longing to stay. I nodded my head every time she listed all the wonderful things she’d miss about England – and as she travels a bit searching for inspiration, I recognized the places she went and I could just feel the appeal coming through the book’s pages.
I also am a huge fan of Jane Austen – I love her work and I often get annoyed that people fail to see more than the romances which make up her books’ plotlines. (Seriously, why do we always dismiss things the minute we learn they’re romantic?) As she wanders the streets and bumps into all the people who are crazy about Jane Austen, Georgina listens to their conversations about the books and can’t understand why everyone cares. I was clamoring for her to just read them for herself – nothing irritates me more than someone who disdains a book without trying to read it first – but in the end I found I really liked her slow discovery of the books’ appeal. The author really got into how fabulous Austen’s books are and it formed a crucial part of the story; she had plenty of opportunities to explain just why her books have universal appeal even now.
I did think Georgina herself was annoying for most of the book, though; I’m not really the type of person who can understand constant procrastination with deadlines looming, so I just wanted her to sit down and write a book already. I’m no author but I can pretty reliably sit down and force out a couple thousand words a day; if she’d just done that from the start, she might have had something she could have worked with. And then there was her refusal to even read Jane Austen for pages on end, and her snobbery, despite the fact that she goes on trips to get into the proper atmosphere. She improved by the end in terms of openness, especially with a couple of sweet romantic interludes, but overall I had trouble understanding her and thus couldn’t really identify with her. The secondary characters were particularly charming, especially Henry and his 14 year old runaway sister, and did help to lessen the annoyance I felt with Georgina.
While the main character got on my nerves, I still found Writing Jane Austen to be a wonderful book in many ways. I think it would be perfectly suited to someone who loves Jane Austen or just loves England and London in particular.
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book for free for review.
 Today I had planned to post about my new deliberate reading strategy, which is basically just a return of my TBR – review – library book rotation, but it already isn’t working out so well for me. I like piling the books up in the order that I should read them, but the minute I land on a dud or feel like I’m not really happy with what I’ve chosen, I start to question what I’m doing. For example, right now I’m trying to get through The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, perfect timing since it just got longlisted for the Booker prize, but I’ll confess, I’m not crazy about it. I don’t really know why, but I just don’t think I’m a fan of David Mitchell’s prose and I’m not really seeing where the story is going – so I’m already impatient with it and worried that a few books are going to slow down my reading. My goal was to slow down my reading, but this isn’t working as well in practice as I had hoped. I’ll have to go back to the drawing board, I think.
Anyway, what I want to talk about now is ebooks. I’ve had a bit of a perfect storm this week leading up to the fact that I am considering getting an ebook reader. First off, the new Kindle 3 is actually in my price range. It’s also going to have a dedicated UK ebook store, the lack of which has put me off other devices in the past. Secondly, we are finally putting our anniversary trip to Paris (I can’t tell you how excited I am) in motion for October and I’m going to be on trains for about four hours each way, but don’t really want the weight of multiple books on my back while wandering around the city. And, to top it off, I ended up reading an ebook on my computer yesterday and today and I really dislike that experience. I also know that I could access at least some of the galleys on netgalley if I had a Kindle (unless a UK Kindle will struggle with this – a question I must ask!) and there are a number of exciting books there I’d love to read on release.
I don’t actually plan on buying too many ebooks full price for the device, but that option would be nice too. My husband is fully in support of the plan because he hates the huge number of unread books I have stacked around. I don’t want to give up paper books, though, and I always feel like I don’t really own the books I have in ebook format, especially knowing about DRM restrictions. Amazon isn’t very good about this, so even though we might end up with access to Kindle for Android on both of our mobiles in a year or two, I’m still hesitating. A couple of years ago I would never even have considered purchasing a Kindle, and I’m not even sure when I changed my mind about that!
So, what do you think? Is an ebook reader a good idea? Do you have one and enjoy using it? Help!
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