In the Land of Pain (Vintage Classics) - Softcover

Daudet, Alphonse

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1101970863 ISBN 13: 9781101970867

Publisher: Vintage, 2016

Synopsis

“Pain, you must be everything for me. Let me find in you all those foreign lands you will not let me visit.” —Alphonse Daudet
 
In the Land of Pain—Alphonse Daudet’s poignant, humorous, and piercing reflections on his years of enduring severe illness—is a classic in the literary annals of human suffering.

Daudet (1840–1897) was a greatly admired writer during his lifetime, praised by Dickens and Henry James. In the prime of his life, he developed an agonizing nerve disease caused by syphilis and began taking notes about his experience, published posthumously as In the Land of Pain. Daudet wrote in powerful, unflinching images about his excruciating symptoms, his fears, his desperate attempts at treatment, and the effects of the morphine he came to depend on. His novelist’s eye and sense of humor did not desert him as he observed the bizarre society of his fellow patients at curative spas, nor did his generosity and compassion for them and for his friends and family. In Julian Barnes’s crystalline translation, Daudet’s notes comprise a record—at once shattering, haunting, and beguiling—of both the banal and the transformative realities of physical suffering.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

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.

About the Author

Alphonse Daudet was born in Nīmes, 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
fifty-seven.

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1101970863
• ISBN 13: 9781101970867
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112