In the Land of Pain
by Alphonse Daudet
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alphonse DaudetTranslator: Julian Barnes
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-01-07
ISBN: 0375414851
Number of pages: 112
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of In the Land of Pain
Book Review: Surprisingly Beautiful For Such an Ugly Subject
Summary: 5 Stars
It is very hard to review this book critically or give it a rating, because one can't judge it by the same criteria with which we usually evaluate books. It isn't a finished work, or even close. It's a collection of notes written for a planned book that never got beyond the note-taking stage due to the death of the author in 1897.
Daudet contracted syphilis at the age of seventeen, and at the time, there was no cure. By the early 1880's he was in the tertiary (final) stage of the disease, which in his case took the form of "tabes dorsalis,' which translates literally as "wasting away of the back." It is a form of neurosyphilis which attacks the spinal cord and column and is one of the slowest and most excruciatingly painful ways that a person can die.
I was interested in this book because my grandfather also died of syphilis. I never knew him - even my father barely remembers him because he was only a child when my grandfather was institutionalized due to his illness. From what few records exists, it seems he may have suffered from the same form as Daudet, as he also had blindness and ataxia. So reading this book felt like a way to connect with my unknown and long-dead grandfather.
It is easy to see why Daudet was so much-loved both as an author and a human being - a friend and a family man. Although known for his philandering (one wonders how he justified marriage and fatherhood, much less a series of love affairs, knowing full well that he had a fatal sexually-transmitted disease), his great love for his wife and children is evident. Not wanting them to suffer too, he exhibited an incredibly rigorous self-control in hiding his pain from his family. (We know this from the many notes written by his friends that are included in the book.) Instead, he channeled his expressions of suffering into his writing. The planned book was to be a journal of the progression of Daudet's pain and his journey into death.
Even unfinished and unedited, and concerning such a difficult and ugly subject, these writings are surprisingly poetic and beautiful. It makes me want to read some of his finished works, and wonder why - although highly popular at the time - they are mostly forgotten today.
The book also includes some important background information about the life and personality of Alphonse Daudet and about the medical manifestations of the disease of syphilis.
(87 pages)
Quotes from In The Land of Pain:
"Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him. Everyone will get used to it except me."
"The walks I used to take around this land of pain. Could still find it in myself to laugh. Lunches. La Bellocquiére. Seen it all again in my mind's eye. Villemagne and the Pont-du-Diable. Felt like crying. I remember what Caoudal said: 'And to think that I shall come to regret all this!'"
"Exchange between the bachelor and the married man. The problem of jealousy, when a man is no longer a man and becomes unable to defend his hearth and home."
Summary of In the Land of Pain
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.
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