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In the Land of Pain

In the Land of Pain

Julian Barnes
3.9/5 ( ratings)
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 . 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 and his treatments ; about his fears and reflections ; his impressions of the patients, himself included, and their strange life at curative baths and spas ; 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.
Language
English
Pages
112
Format
Hardcover
Publisher
Knopf
Release
January 07, 2003
ISBN
0375414851
ISBN 13
9780375414855

In the Land of Pain

Julian Barnes
3.9/5 ( ratings)
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 . 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 and his treatments ; about his fears and reflections ; his impressions of the patients, himself included, and their strange life at curative baths and spas ; 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.
Language
English
Pages
112
Format
Hardcover
Publisher
Knopf
Release
January 07, 2003
ISBN
0375414851
ISBN 13
9780375414855

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