The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
After a stroke left Bauby paralyzed except for his left eyelid, he dictated this memoir letter by letter, by blinking. The book is 137 pages of the most weightless prose in any language, written from inside what should have been a sealed room. He died ten days after publication.
Bauby's narrating voice draws a recurring complaint: readers call it smug, particularly around women, with one writing there's “a sort of smugness in his attitude, especially towards women” running through the book. The pre-stroke material, the magazine-editor glamour, gets read as name-dropping rather than earned reflection; one reader points bluntly at “his trips to Hong Kong, his BMW, his phone calls.” The fragmentary, non-chronological vignettes keep some scenes from landing with real force, and one reviewer admits “the vignettes themselves were less moving than I wanted.” A further complaint holds that adjusting to total paralysis this gracefully reads as evasion of anger rather than genuine peace. Skeptics add that the book's reputation rests more on the extraordinary circumstances of its making than on the writing alone.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
